aci multisite L2 connection across site with flooding

14.01 2020 | by massimiliano

aci multisite L2 connection across site with flooding Cisco ACI Multi-Site design provides traditional Layer 2 stretching of bridge […]

Cisco ACI Multi-Site design provides traditional Layer 2 stretching of bridge domains across sites, including the capability to flood Layer 2 BUM frames

The need to flood BUM traffic is driven by specific requirements such as application clustering (which traditionally calls for the use of Layer 2 multicast communication between different application cluster nodes) or support for live (hot) migration (which requires Layer 2 Gratuitous ARP [GARP] and Reverse ARP [RARP] frames to be flooded in the Layer 2 domain of the migrating endpoint)

ACI Multi-Pod usually would be positioned as the architectural choice for deployments requiring full Layer 2 flooding between Cisco ACI islands, one advantage offered by the multi-site design with this configuration is the capability to tightly control which bridge domains are extended and which are kept local

ACI Multi-Site policy manager in fact allows you to differentiate the flooding behavior on a per–bridge domain level, which is useful in a real-life scenario in which the flooding behavior must be supported only in a subset of the stretched bridge domains