6. EVPN with Multiple Data-Plane Encapsulations
6. EVPN with Multiple Data-Plane Encapsulations
The use of the BGP Encapsulation Extended Community per [RFC5512] allows each NVE in a given EVI to know each of the encapsulations supported by each of the other NVEs in that EVI. That is, each of the NVEs in a given EVI may support multiple data-plane encapsulations. An ingress NVE can send a frame to an egress NVE only if the set of encapsulations advertised by the egress NVE forms a non-empty intersection with the set of encapsulations supported by the ingress NVE; it is at the discretion of the ingress NVE which encapsulation to choose from this intersection. (As noted in Section 5.1.3, if the BGP Encapsulation extended community is not present, then the default MPLS encapsulation or a locally configured encapsulation is assumed.)
When a PE advertises multiple supported encapsulations, it MUST advertise encapsulations that use the same EVPN procedures including procedures associated with split-horizon filtering described in Section 8.3.1. For example, VXLAN and NVGRE (or MPLS and MPLS over GRE) encapsulations use the same EVPN procedures; thus, a PE can advertise both of them and can support either of them or both of them simultaneously. However, a PE MUST NOT advertise VXLAN and MPLS encapsulations together because (a) the MPLS field of EVPN routes is set to either an MPLS label or a VNI, but not both and (b) some EVPN procedures (such as split-horizon filtering) are different for VXLAN/NVGRE and MPLS encapsulations.
An ingress node that uses shared multicast trees for sending broadcast or multicast frames MAY maintain distinct trees for each different encapsulation type.
It is the responsibility of the operator of a given EVI to ensure that all of the NVEs in that EVI support at least one common encapsulation. If this condition is violated, it could result in service disruption or failure. The use of the BGP Encapsulation Extended Community provides a method to detect when this condition is violated, but the actions to be taken are at the discretion of the operator and are outside the scope of this document.