Fast Recovery for EVPN Designated Forwarder Election

Fast Recovery for EVPN Designated Forwarder Election Cisco

pbrisset@cisco.com

Cisco

sajassi@cisco.com

Cisco

lburdet@cisco.com

Juniper

jdrake@juniper.net

Nokia

jorge.rabadan@nokia.com

General BESS Working Group EVPN Designated Forwarder Convergence Recovery Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) solution provides Designated Forwarder election procedures for multihomed Ethernet Segments. These procedures have been enhanced further by applying Highest Random Weight (HRW) Algorithm for Designated Forwarded election in order to avoid unnecessary DF status changes upon a failure. This draft improves these procedures by providing a fast Designated Forwarder (DF) election upon recovery of the failed link or node associated with the multihomed Ethernet Segment. The solution is independent of number of EVIs associated with that Ethernet Segment and it is performed via a simple signaling between the recovered PE and each of the other PEs in the multihoming group. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) solution is becoming pervasive in data center (DC) applications for Network Virtualization Overlay (NVO) and DC interconnect (DCI) services, and in service provider (SP) applications for next generation virtual private LAN services. The EVPN specification describes DF election procedures for multihomed Ethernet Segments. These procedures are enhanced further in by applying Highest Random Weight Algorithm for DF election in order to avoid DF status change unnecessarily upon a link or node failure associated with the multihomed Ethernet Segment. This draft makes further improvement to DF election procedures in by providing an option for a fast DF election upon recovery of the failed link or node associated with the multihomed Ethernet Segment. This DF election is achieved independent of number of EVIs associated with that Ethernet Segment and it is performed via a simple signaling between the recovered PE and each of the other PEs in the multihomed group. The solution is based on simple one-way signaling mechanism.

Provider Edge (PE):: A device that sits in the boundary of Provider and Customer networks and performs encap/decap of data from L2 to L3 and vice-versa.
Designated Forwarder (DF):: A PE that is currently forwarding (encapsulating/decapsulating) traffic for a given VLAN in and out of a site.

In EVPN technology, multiple PE devices have the ability to encap and decap data belonging to the same VLAN. In certain situations, this may cause L2 duplicates and even loops if there is a momentary overlap of forwarding roles between two or more PE devices, leading to broadcast storms. EVPN currently uses timer based synchronization among PE devices in redundancy group that can result in duplications (and even loops) because of multiple DFs if the timer is too short or blackholing if the timer is too long. Using split-horizon filtering () can prevent loops (but not duplicates), however if there are overlapping DFs in two different sites at the same time for the same VLAN, the site identifier will be different upon re-entry of the packet and hence the split-horizon check will fail, leading to L2 loops. The updated DF procedures in use the well known HRW (Highest Random Weight) algorithm to avoid reshuffling of VLANs among PE devices in the redundancy group upon failure/&wj;recovery. This reduces the impact to VLANs not assigned to the failed/&wj;recovered ports and eliminates loops or duplicates at failure/&wj;recovery events. However, upon PE insertion or port bring-up (recovery event), HRW also cannot help as a transfer of DF role to the newly inserted device/port must occur while the old DF is still active.

In the Figure 1, when PE2 is inserted or booted up, PE1 will transfer DF role of some VLANs to PE2 to achieve load balancing. However, because there is no handshake mechanism between PE1 and PE2, duplication of DF roles for a given VLAN is possible. Duplication of DF roles may eventually lead to duplication of traffic as well as L2 loops. Current EVPN specification and relies on a timer-based approach for transferring the DF role to the newly inserted device. This can cause the following issues:

Loops/Duplicates if the timer value is too short
Prolonged Traffic Blackholing if the timer value is too long

The solution relies on the concept of common clock alignment between partner PEs participating to a common Ethernet Segment. The main idea is to have all peering PEs of that Ethernet Segment perform DF election, and apply their resulting carving state, at a same well-known time. The DF Election procedure, as described in and as optionally signalled in , is applied. All PEs attached to a given Ethernet Segment are clock-synchronized; using a networking protocol for clock synchronization (e.g. NTP, PTP, etc.). Newly inserted device PE or during failure recovery of a PE, that PE communicates the current time to peering partners plus the remaining peering timer time left. This constitutes an "end time" or "absolute time" as seen from local PE. That absolute time is called "Service Carving Time" (SCT). A new BGP Extended Community is advertised along with Ethernet Segment route (RT-4) to communicate to other partners the Service Carving Time. Upon reception of that new BGP Extended Community, partner PEs know exactly its carving time. The notion of skew is introduced to eliminate any potential duplicate traffic or loops. They add a skew (default = -10ms) to the Service Carving Time to enforce this. The previously inserted PE(s) must carve first, followed shortly(skew) by the newly insterted PE. To summarize, all peering PEs carve almost simultaneously at the time announced by newly added/recovered PE. The newly inserted PE initiates the SCT, and carves immediately on peering timer expiry. The previously inserted PE(s) receiving Ethernet Segment route (RT-4) with a SCT BGP extended community, carve shortly before Service Carving Time.

There are multiples advantages of using the approach. Here is a non- exhaustive list:

A simple uni-directional signaling is all that is needed
Backwards-compatible: PEs supporting only older shall simply discard unrecognized new "Service Carving Timestamp" BGP Extended Community
Multiple DF Election algorithms can be supported:
- default ordered list ordinal algorithm (Modulo),
- highest-random weight, etc.
Independent of BGP transmission delay regarding Ethernet Segment route (RT-4)
Agnostic of the time synchronization mechanism used (e.g. NTP, PTP, etc.)

A new BGP extended community needs to be defined to communicate the Service Carving Timestamp for each Ethernet Segment. A new transitive extended community where the Type field is 0x06, and the Sub-Type is 0x0F is advertised along with Ethernet Segment route. The expected Service Carving Time is encoded as a 8-octet value as follows:

The timestamp exchanged uses the NTP epoch of January 1, 1900 . The 64-bit timestamp of the NTP protocol consists of a 32-bit part for seconds and a 32-bit part for fractional second:

Timestamp Seconds: 32-bit NTP seconds are encoded in this field.
Timestamp Fractional Seconds: 16 bits of the NTP fractional seconds are encoded in this field. The use of a 16-bit fractional seconds yields adequate precision of 15 microseconds (2^-16 s).

This document introduces a new flag called "T" (for Time Synchronization) to the bitmap field of the DF Election Extended Community defined in .

Bit 3: Time Synchronization (corresponds to Bit 27 of the DF Election Extended Community). When set to 1, it indicates the desire to use Time Synchronization capability with the rest of the PEs in the Ethernet Segment.

This capability is used in conjunction with the agreed upon DF Type (DF Election Type). For example if all the PEs in the Ethernet Segment indicated that they have Time Synchronization capability and they want the DF type to be HRW, then HRW algorithm is used in conjunction with this capability.

Let's take Figure 1 as an example where initially PE2 had failed and PE1 had taken over. This example shows the problem with the DF-Election mechanism in . Based on , using the default 3 second peering timer:

Initial state: PE1 is in steady-state, PE2 is recovering
PE2 recovers at (absolute) time t=99
PE2 advertises RT-4 (sent at t=100) to partner PE1
PE2 starts a 3 second peering timer
PE1 carves immediately on RT-4 reception, i.e. t=100 + minimal BGP propagation delay
PE2 carves at time t=103

aims of favouring traffic black hole over duplicate traffic. With above procedure, traffic black holing will occur as part of each PE recovery sequence since PE1 has transitioned some VLANs to Non-Designated-Forwarder (NDF) immediately upon reception.
The peering timer value (default = 3 seconds) has a direct effect on the duration of the blackholing. A shorter (esp. zero) peering timer may, however, result in duplicate traffic or traffic loops. Based on the Service Carving Time (SCT) approach:

Initial state: PE1 is in steady-state, PE2 is recovering
PE2 recovers at (absolute) time t=99
PE2 advertises RT-4 (sent at t=100) with target SCT value t=103 to partner PE1
PE2 starts 3 second peering timer
Both PE1 and PE2 carve at (absolute) time t=103

In fact, PE1 should carve slightly before PE2 (skew). The previously inserted PE2 that is recovering performs both transitions DF to NDF and NDF to DF per VLANs at the peering timer expiry. Since the goal is to prevent duplicates, the original PE1, which received the SCT will apply:

DF to NDF transition at t=SCT minus skew where both PEs are NDF for 'skew' amount of time
NDF to DF transition at t=SCT

It is this split-behaviour which ensures good transition of DF role with contained amount of loss. Using SCT approach, the negative effect of the peering timer is mitigated. Furthermore, the BGP Ethernet Segment route (RT-4) transmission delay (from PE2 to PE1) becomes a non-issue. The use of SCT approach remedies the problem associated with the peering timer: the 3 second timer window is shortened to the order of milliseconds.

Per redundancy group, for the DF election procedures to be globally convergent and unanimous, it is necessary that all the participating PEs agree on the DF Election algorithm to be used. It is, however, possible that some PEs continue to use the existing modulo-based DF election and do not rely on the new SCT BGP extended community. PEs running a baseline DF election mechanism will simply discard the new SCT BGP extended community as unrecognized. A PE can indicate its willingness to support clock-synched carving by signaling the new 'T' DF Election Capability as well as including the new Service Carving Time BGP extended community along with the Ethernet Segment Route (Type-4). In the case where one or more PEs attached to the Ethernet Segment do not signal T=1, all PEs in the Ethernet Segment SHALL revert back to the timer approach. This is especially important in the context of the VLAN shuffling with more than 2 PEs.

The mechanisms in this document use EVPN control plane as defined in . Security considerations described in are equally applicable. This document uses MPLS and IP-based tunnel technologies to support data plane transport. Security considerations described in and in are equally applicable.

This document solicits the allocation of the following sub-type in the "EVPN Extended Community Sub-Types" registry setup by :

This document solicits the allocation of the following values in the "DF Election Capabilities" registry setup by :

In addition to the authors listed on the front page, the following co-authors have also contributed substantially to this document: Gaurav Badoni
Cisco Email: gbadoni@cisco.com Dhananjaya Rao
Cisco Email: dhrao@cisco.com

Authors would like to acknowledge helpful comments and contributions of Satya Mohanty and Bharath Vasudevan. Also thank you to Anoop Ghanwani for his thorough review with valuable comments and corrections.