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This chapter contains the following sections :
The Virtual Station Interface (VSI) Discovery and Configuration Protocol (VDP) on the Cisco Nexus 1000V is part of the IEEE standard 802.1Qbg (Edge Virtual Bridging - [EVB]) that can detect and signal the presence of end hosts and exchange capability with an adjacent VDP-capable bridge. The VDP serves as a reliable first-hop protocol that communicates the presence of end-host Virtual Machines (VMs) to adjacent leaf nodes on the Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) architecture. In addition to detecting the MAC and IP addresses of the end-host VMs when a host comes up, or during VM mobility events, VDP also triggers auto-configuration of leaf nodes on the DFA architecture to make them ready for further VM traffic.
VDP enables network-based overlays that are a more scalable alternative compared to the host-based overlays for segmentation and enables access to more than 4000 vlans in a multi tenant network. When you configure VDP on the Cisco Nexus 1000V, segmentation support for bridge domains is extended to native encapsulated bridge domains. The original Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) based bridge domains can also coexist with these bridge domains.
For more information about the Cisco DFA architecture, see the Cisco DFA Solutions Guide.
The VSI Discovery Protocol (VDP) provides the following features:
The components and functioning of the VDP Exchange in the Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation architecture are described below:
When an end host (VM) is instantiated , the Cisco Nexus 1000V on the VDP station (host server) registers its presence with the VDP bridge and passes the network information to the Cisco DFA leaf switch using VDP. The DFA leaf switch then retrieves and applies the corresponding port profile to the end host to provide an automatic provisioning mechanism for reachability and network control.