The Prestera chips theoretically support hardware offload of vxlan. We have vxlan software support, but no comments on whether hardware offload may be coming. Is this a roadmap feature, a “we don’t think customers really want it”, or “we’ve determined it’ll take different chips”?
It would be awesome to deploy vxlan driven networks with the CRS3/5xx series chips, rather than needing to “step up” to Aruba/Cisco/whatever.
The essential idea/advantage is you can run a full L3 distribution layer and still have L2 roaming across the network. So every edge/access switch might have one big “printers” vlan, but the same “printers” vlan doesn’t exist on your aggregation or core layers.
Edit: to cut-off the “why not EoIP or GRE” answers. In short, cross-compatibility. I’ve had to deploy vxlan in production crossing Aruba/Cisco/Dell/Fortinet without issue. VXLAN has some multicast features that make it much more attractive than the other two for the scenario described above (NVGRE is a competing standard, but support is rarer). Honestly, my primary use has been doing stupid L2 bridge over L3 connection scenarios with mis-matched hardware.
lil Necro here…
I’m also looking forward to this, I would absolutely love if the CCR2216/2116 / CRS518 series can support vxlan in hardware, an absolute must for me.
MVP static VXLAN HW-offload support would be a killer, IMO.
Even if MT charged an extra (non-exorbitant(!), preferably non-recurring) license fee for it. That made the cost less than competing (more expensive) competitor product offerings.
eVPN is purely control plane e.g. signalling, so can only ever be done in software. Mikrotik would need to add this to the RouterOS v7 routing engine, I pray that when they add eVPN support they allow for both VXLAN and MPLS transport as they have different use-cases.
VXLAN is the part that is on the data plane and needs to be done in Hardware, e.g. on the ASIC.