EFA features allows automation of the fabric (Clos / Non-Clos) life-cycle management, tenant L2/L3 networks life-cycle management on top of the fabric infrastructure and ecosystem (vCenter / Openstack / HyperV) integration.
Fabric Service is responsible for automating the Fabric BGP underlay and EVPN overlay. By default, the EVPN overlay is enabled but you can disable it before provisioning if necessary. The Fabric Service exposes the CLI and REST API to clients for automating the Fabric underlay and overlay configuration.
Underlay automation includes interface configurations (IP numbered), BGP underlay for spine and leaf, BFD, and MCT configurations. Overlay automation includes EVPN and overlay gateway configuration. The Fabric Service is deployed along with the Inventory and Tenant services.
The Tenant Service exposes the CLI and REST API for automating the tenant network configuration on the Clos and non-Clos overlay Fabric. Tenant network configuration includes VLAN, BD, VE, EVPN, VTEP, VRF, and router BGP configuration on the necessary Fabric devices to provide Layer 2-Extension, Layer 3-Extension across the Fabric, Layer 2-Handoff, and Layer 3-Handoff at the edge of the Fabric.
The Inventory Service is a REST layer on top of device inventory details, with the capability to filter data based on certain fields. The Inventory Service securely stores the credentials of devices in encrypted form and makes those credentials available to different components such as the Fabric and Tenant services.
The Inventory Service supports the execute-cli option for pushing configuration and exec commands that are not included in the EFA CLI to devices. Examples include configuring SNMP parameters or OSPF configurations. This supports lets you use EFA for any SLX-OS command and push the same configuration to multiple devices.
The Asset Service provides the secure credential store and deep discovery of physical and logical assets of the managed devices. The service publishes the Asset refresh and change events to other services.
The Notification Service sends events, alerts, and tasks to external entities. Notifications sent from EFA are derived from the syslog events received from the devices that EFA manages. Alerts are notifications that services in EFA send for unexpected conditions. Tasks are user-driven operations or timer-based tasks such as device registration or Fabric creation.
The RASlog Service acts as a syslog server to process syslog messages from devices. The service also acts as an SNMP trap receiver to process traps from devices.
Authentication and authorization enforce a security boundary between northbound clients and the downstream operations between EFA and SLX devices.
You can deploy EFA on an external Virtual Machine to support more than 24 devices or based on where tools are deployed within the Data Center. Running EFA on the TPVM or an external VM provides added deployment flexibility.