8.2. Fast Convergence

8.2. Fast Convergence

In EVPN, MAC address reachability is learned via the BGP control plane over the MPLS network. As such, in the absence of any fast protection mechanism, the network convergence time is a function of the number of MAC/IP Advertisement routes that must be withdrawn by the PE encountering a failure. For highly scaled environments, this scheme yields slow convergence.

To alleviate this, EVPN defines a mechanism to efficiently and quickly signal, to remote PE nodes, the need to update their forwarding tables upon the occurrence of a failure in connectivity to an Ethernet segment. This is done by having each PE advertise a set of one or more Ethernet A-D per ES routes for each locally attached Ethernet segment (refer to Section 8.2.1 below for details on how these routes are constructed). A PE may need to advertise more than one Ethernet A-D per ES route for a given ES because the ES may be in a multiplicity of EVIs and the RTs for all of these EVIs may not fit into a single route. Advertising a set of Ethernet A-D per ES routes for the ES allows each route to contain a subset of the complete set of RTs. Each Ethernet A-D per ES route is differentiated from the other routes in the set by a different Route Distinguisher (RD).

Upon a failure in connectivity to the attached segment, the PE withdraws the corresponding set of Ethernet A-D per ES routes. This triggers all PEs that receive the withdrawal to update their next-hop adjacencies for all MAC addresses associated with the Ethernet segment in question. If no other PE had advertised an Ethernet A-D route for the same segment, then the PE that received the withdrawal simply invalidates the MAC entries for that segment. Otherwise, the PE updates its next-hop adjacencies accordingly.