Building a VXLAN EVPN Fabric on NX-OS 9000v
The first entry in a four-part series on VXLAN EVPN automation. Before automating anything, I built the fabric by hand: a leaf-spine topology on Cisco NX-OS 9000v, with BGP EVPN as the control plane and VXLAN as the data plane for Layer 2 and Layer 3 extension across the fabric.
This manual build established the baseline configuration and the exact per-device state that later automation approaches — Ansible, then Cisco NSO — would need to reproduce and eventually generate from a single source of truth.
Covered in this article: the underlay (OSPF-based), the BGP EVPN overlay, VNI mapping, anycast gateway configuration, and the verification commands used to confirm the fabric was healthy before layering automation on top of it.
Read the full walkthrough, with configuration snippets and verification output, on Medium: