VXLAN Setup on 7.0 Advice sought.

Question

Hi All,

I have a client who we are moving VMware ESX from a Data Centre to the head office. They have FGT's at both ends. Soon to be v7

And we have about 2 VLAN's at the DC we wish to have replicated over to the head office.

Head Office: 192.168.2.0/24

Data Centre: 192.168.100.0/24 (Default VLAN)

Data Centre: 192.168.101.0/24 (VLAN 101) - VMware Vmotion

The customer already has an existing IPSEC tunnel to the Data Centre from the Head Office and vice versa.

If I add the VXLAN as per the cookbook. I am assuming this will break the routing of the existing IPSEC tunnel? I am also assuming that I can run multiple VLAN's over VXLAN?

So should I tell the Head Office Fortigate to route 192.168.100.0/24 & 192.168.101.0/24 to the local VXLAN interfaces? and remove the configuration for the existing IPSEC tunnels?

And when I get this setup, do I just leave the default gateway at the same at both sites? And when a device wants internet access from Head Office on the VXLAN, does it route it over the IPSEC to go out the default gateway at the DC?

I am trying to avoid any potential snags, before deployment. So if anyone has advice/experience that may help. I would be happy to hear it.

Andy

alafrance · Answer

Hi AndyIf I were in your position , I would try and _avoid_ the use of VXLAN if its not strictly necessary , expanding Layer 2 networks over large distances is not always the best solution , but I recognize this is sometimes unavoidable.  The main concern is primarily with hardware acceleration , VXLAN acceleration is relatively new on Fortinet HW and only started showing up on NP7 platforms over the last 2-3 years. If you're used to having acceleration on your IPSEC tunnels , using VXLAN may make you lose that benefit , and depending on your use case may impact performance negatively. If you have fortigate models with decent CPU's onboard , then VXLAN's performance impact may be more or less mitigated if not a huge volume of traffic is expected over the extension. That being said , there's a good example on how to do this here that doesn't require you to convert your IPSEC tunnel to strictly use VXLAN only. Unicast Traffic could still run over it normally alongside VXLAN since the VXLAN "tunnel" is just established between the IP's set on the IPSEC interfaces in this example below: https://community.fortinet.com/t5/FortiGate/Technical-Tip-VXLAN-over-IPsec-for-multiple-VLANs-using-software/ta-p/195488I hope this helps!

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