Campus Overlay
The Aruba ESP campus supports two overlay network topologies: centralized forwarding and distributed forwarding.
Centralized forwarding is implemented by tunneling data traffic to a gateway cluster for policy enforcement and bridging. This design is used in tunneled mode wireless and user-based tunneling (UBT) wired deployments. Gateway clusters can provide a very high-throughput and powerful policy enforcement point. This design is particularly effective with predominantly northbound traffic such as Internet-bound Wi-Fi traffic.
Distributed forwarding is implemented by forming an EVPN-VXLAN fabric between a group of switches within a LAN and enforcing policy within the fabric switches. The use of a dynamic control plane and a distributed policy enforcement model provides for a more efficient and scalar campus overlay solution when East-West traffic is considered.
A centralized wireless overlay deployment was described in Campus Wireless Connectivity. The following process describes deployment of a distributed overlay using the Aruba Central NetConductor solution.