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NVO3 Datacenter Fabric: Geneve OAM, Encapsulation Considerations, EVPN Applicability — draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-oam, draft-ietf-nvo3-encap, draft-ietf-nvo3-evpn-applicability#

IETF 122 (Bangkok) digest Program Core pick Bangkok · 15–21 March 2025

  • Tier: Core
  • Why: This is the datacenter overlay stack you work on directly — the WG has settled on Geneve as the common encapsulation, and this cycle's work fills in the two things that actually bite in production: OAM for troubleshooting overlays, and formalizing why the choice was Geneve over VXLAN-GPE/GUE in the first place.
  • What: geneve-oam specifies requirements and a framework for Operations, Administration, and Maintenance in Geneve overlay networks. encap records the WG's encapsulation-considerations analysis and states the conclusion: Geneve, with modifications, as the common NVO3 encapsulation. evpn-applicability describes using EVPN as the NVO3 control plane for NVE auto-discovery and MAC/IP dissemination without requiring PIM in the underlay. (from abstract only)
  • How: EVPN reuses BGP for the overlay control plane while keeping the underlay IP fabric independent of it; Geneve's extensible option-TLV design lets new capabilities (including OAM) ship without a new wire format.
  • Where applicable: Multi-tenant DC fabrics. encap flags a genuine operational constraint worth internalizing: mixing encapsulations along a path complicates path-MTU discovery and OAM — relevant if you run heterogeneous hardware/software tunnel endpoints.