Nexus 9K VXLAN as a DCI

Hi All,

I just want to reach out to others who may have some experience as using VXLAN as a basic DCI solution.

Quick background

I'm working with a customer that has 4 x Nexus Cisco 93180YX-EX switches, two in their primary DC and two in their DR DC. They are connecting the sites via a back-to-back vPC over 2 x 10GbE dark fibre circuits which stretches roughly 10 VLANs that are needed for DR purposes (this needs to remain and the customer wont rework their DR solution)

The customer also has a point-to-point LES circuit between sites that carries a couple of other VLANs for a certain application. Again, the customer wants to keep this in place (circuit is cheap and they want to keep this application traffic separate)

I'm looking to improve the network while trying to meet the customers requirements. One of the biggest issues is with the spanning-tree config as different VLAN priorities have been set on all of the switches and its just a nightmare to manage and support. One option that I have seen is to filter STP on the DCI links to allow each site to become its own STP domain but this is not possible due to the different L2 connections between sites.

One option that I'm looking at is change the DCI connections from L2 to L3 and then run VXLAN over the top to stretch the required VLANs. Is this a recommend approach? Layer 3 will be so much easier to manage and traffic engineer etc. If so, to reduce complexity, can I use simple static ingress replication instead of multicast/BGP EVPN for this purpose?

Thanks all

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