Fabric Attach Overview

Fabric Attach uses the IEEE802.1ab LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) extensions to automatically attach network devices to individual services in a IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) network. These network devices typically do not support SPB, MAC-in-MAC (802.1ah) or Network Services Identifier (NSI)/Individual Service Identifier (ISID) usage, and therefore cannot easily take advantage of the Fabric infrastructure without manual configuration of VLAN attachments to NSIs or ISIDs in multiple locations. Fabric Attach deals with this issue by facilitating automated network device discovery and the automatic configuration and teardown of NSI/ISID to VLAN associations at the edge of the network. Fabric Attach can also use the same LLDP extensions to allow Fabric Attach clients and proxy devices to connect to VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) overlay networks.

Note

Both terms NSI and ISID are used in this document, with NSI being the preferred term. For ExtremeXOS, the NSI is an ISID in SPB fabrics, but the NSI could also be used to as an identifier for other (non-SPB) fabrics where it will not be an ISID.

Fabric Attach supports the following:

Single LAG (Link Aggregation Group) between any two devices
SPBM networks: Fabric Attach client and proxy behavior
VXLAN overlay networks: Fabric Attach client, proxy, and server behavior
Connection to a single Fabric Attach server
One-to-one mapping between a VLAN and an NSI/ISID
Stacking
RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) authentication

Limitations

Mappings of VLANs to NSIs/ISIDs is limited to 94.

Fabric Attach does not support the following:

MIB (Management Information Base)
MLAG (Multi-switch Link Aggregation Group)
Fabric Attach TLV (Type Length Value) authentication
Fabric Attach standalone proxy

Published March 2020prev | next

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