IX.br São Paulo: Migration to SRv6 EVPN#

Julio Sirota, NIC.br

• Why: A production migration template for anyone running a large L2 fabric (IXP peering LAN or DC) on aging LDP+VPLS: flood-based MAC learning, ARP/ND storms, and unknown-unicast flooding are exactly the failure modes EVPN was built to fix.
• What: The completed migration of IX.br São Paulo (one of the world's largest IX fabrics) from LDP+VPLS to SRv6 EVPN. Concrete results: 84% of equipment (97% of capacity) now on EVPN CSID SRv6 with proxy ARP/ND, unknown-unicast flood eliminated, and a large measured drop in ARP/Neighbor Solicitation volume — including visible reduction in CPU load on participant routers.
• How: RFC 8560 "VPLS and EVPN seamless integration" allowed PE-by-PE replacement with the core forwarding both MPLS and IPv6/SRv6 labels during migration, no gateway needed. Proxy ARP/ND uses the RFC 9047 ARP/ND Extended Community with the Immutable flag so static entries prevail over dynamic ones, which both kills broadcast storms and prevents participants answering ARP/ND for IPs that are not theirs (spoofing protection).
• Where applicable: IX.br-specific production story, but the mechanism is standard-track (RFC 8560, RFC 9047) and broadly applicable to any VPLS estate with SRv6-capable PEs. The seamless-migration trick (dual-plane forwarding, one box at a time) is the transferable part.