SDN Integration

The Proxmox Datacenter Manager allows managing SDN zones and vnets across multiple remotes and provides an overview of the current state of SDN entities.

Status Overview

The status overview shows the current status (available / error / unknown) of all zones on all remotes. This is equivalent to the status shown in the SDN overview of the Proxmox VE Web UI. A summary is also shown on the dashboard, allowing users to quickly identify if there are any erroneous SDN zones on any remote.

EVPN Integration

The EVPN overview shows an aggregated overview of the contents of EVPN zones / routing table instances of all configured clusters.

Note

Currently, the integration operates under the assumption that EVPN controllers with the same ASN are interconnected and part of the same overlay network. Zones and Vnets with the same ASN:VNI tag will get automatically merged in the overview trees.

The EVPN integration respects the ‘Route Target Import’ field of an EVPN zone and assumes any Zones / Vnets with that Route Target are imported as well.

Defintions

Currently, the SDN stack in Proxmox VE uses the terms Zones and VNets, which are specific to the Proxmox VE stack. The following defintions try to make the relationship of those entities to the more commonly used definitions in RFC 7432 and RFC 9136 clearer:

A EVPN zone represents a routing table instance (identified by its ASN:VNI tag). This is also known as an IP-VRF It is associated with a VXLAN VNI (the VRF-VXLAN tag of a zone) and also referred to as L3VNI.

A vnet in an EVPN zone represents a bridging table (identified by its ASN:VNI tag). This is also known as a MAC-VRF. One IP-VRF can contain multiple MAC-VRFs. Analogous to a EVPN zone it is associated with a VXLAN VNI (the tag of a vnet) and also referred to as L2VNI.

Remotes

This view provides an overview of which zones are available on a remote and which vnets it contains. It shows the vnets that are locally configured on that remote, as well as the vnets that get imported either automatically (due to matching ASN:VNI tags) or manually (due to being specified in the ‘Route Target Import’ setting). Vnets that are not local to a remote are shown slightly greyed out, so they can be distinguished easily.

It contains the following columns:

  • Name: The name of the remote / zone / vnet

  • L3VNI: The VRF-VXLAN tag configured in the zone

  • L2VNI: The tag configured in the vnet

  • External: Whether this VNet is locally configured or from another remote

  • Imported: Whether this VNet was manually imported, due to a respective ‘Route Target Import’ entry

IP-VRF

This view provides an overview of all available IP-VRFs and their contents. This view shows only VNets that are naturally part of an IP-VRF due to their zone having the same ASN:VNI combination. It can be used to see which VNets would get imported when specifying the respective ASN:VNI in the ‘Route Target Import’ field.

It contains the following columns:

  • Name: The name of the remote / zone / vnet

  • ASN: The VRF-VXLAN tag configured in the zone

  • VNI: The L3VNI (for zones) or L2VNI (for vnets)

  • Zone: The name of the zone that contains the vnet

  • Remote: The name of the remote that contains the zone (and therefore vnet).

Status Panel

Selecting a zone or vnet shows the current status of the IP-VRF / MAC-VRF for the selected zone / vnet on a given node. The node can be selected via the dropdown in the EVPN status panel.

For zones it shows the contents of the IP-VRF, as seen by the kernel. This means that routes for guests located on the note do not show up in the IP-VRF status, since they are handled by the connected route for the subnet. For vnets it shows the type 2 routes, as learned via BGP, so all guests are included in this view.

The following properties are shown for entries in the zone:

  • Destination: The CIDR of the destination for this routing table entry

  • Nexthops: The nexthops for this route, for vnets this is usually the local bridge - for externally learned routes (e.g. default routes) the IP of the next hop

  • Protocol: The protocol via which this routes was learned

  • Metric: The metric (or cost) of a route, lower cost routes are preferred over higher cost routes

The following properties are shown for entries in the vnet:

  • IP Address: The IP-Address from the type-2 route

  • MAC Address: The MAC-Address from the type-2 route

  • via: The nexthop for the type-2 route