Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller Adaptor for DFA White Paper

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Cisco DFA uses standard and well-known protocols and functions. All of them are enhanced and optimized for

scale and resiliency.

With the usage of POAP together with Cisco Prime DCNM, the Day-0 configuration of a single switch or a full

network infrastructure can be reduced from days to minutes.

Cisco Prime DCNM provides network as well as network-service abstraction by using config-profiles. The change

of the operational model increases the speed and consistency of workload deployment and decommissioning.

With combining the best of Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding, Cisco DFA optimizes the need for flood and learn to a

minimum, by integrating an additional control plane for host and subnet information exchange. Additional to the

optimized forwarding and learning, we also follow the concept of separation of an IP address from its location,

similar to LISP (Location/ID separation protocol). The distributed gateway of Cisco DFA does not only provide a

default gateway closest to the host, it also reduces the failure domain to a single or a pair of switches (if using

vPC+).

The usage of virtual fabrics within Cisco DFA provides a similar approach for traffic separation as MPLS L3VPN

does but for Layer 2 as well as Layer 3 traffic. Instead of a MPLS encapsulation and labels, we leverage the IEEE

802.1Q header of classic Ethernet. In order to be able to scale beyond the today available 4096 VLAN (12 bits), we

doubled the IEEE 802.1Q header (24 bits), which gives us a name space of 16 million identifiers called

Segment-ID.

For More Information

For more information and additional documents, white paper, release notes as well as installation and configuration

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C11-731098-01 05/14