Cisco Nexus Dashboard 4.1: VXLAN EVPN Fabric Deployment

In this hands-on lab, you will explore the end-to-end workflow of deploying, managing, and extending a VXLAN EVPN fabric using Cisco Nexus Dashboard 4.1. The lab begins with device onboarding, where you'll discover and import Cisco Nexus switches into Nexus Dashboard. You'll then move on to vPC configuration, creating VRFs and networks, and attaching them to leaf switches to establish segmentation and tenant connectivity.

As the lab progresses, you'll implement external route advertisement to connect the fabric to outside networks and configure route leaking to enable controlled communication between isolated VRFs. You'll also learn the functional differences between Border Gateways (BGWs) and Border Gateway Spines, understanding their respective roles in local and inter-site routing within VXLAN EVPN deployments.

Finally, you'll integrate multiple fabrics into a Multi-Site Domain (MSD), using Nexus Dashboard to build a scalable, distributed architecture that enables seamless connectivity between geographically separate data centers or campus sites.

By the end of this lab, you will have gained practical experience with every major stage of VXLAN EVPN fabric lifecycle management from onboarding and segmentation to route control and multi-site interconnectivity, all through the powerful orchestration capabilities of Nexus Dashboard 4.1.

The goal of this lab is to provide hands-on experience with Cisco Nexus Dashboard 4.1 and the end-to-end workflow of deploying and managing a VXLAN EVPN fabric. By the end of this lab, you will be able to:

• Onboard Cisco Nexus switches into Nexus Dashboard and organize them into fabrics
• Configure vPCs to provide redundancy and dual-homing for connected devices
• Create and assign VRFs and networks to enable segmentation and endpoint connectivity
• Implement route leaking between VRFs to allow controlled inter-VRF communication
• Advertise external routes into the fabric to simulate connectivity to external networks
• Understand the functional differences between Border Gateways and Border Gateway Spines
• Build and validate a Multi-Site Domain (MSD) that connects multiple fabrics using an Inter-Site Network (ISN)

This lab emphasizes both conceptual understanding and practical configuration, helping you gain the skills required to design, deploy, and troubleshoot modern VXLAN-based data center and campus network architectures.

• Nexus Dashboard (4.1.1g) 
• 14× Nexus 9000v switches (NX-OS 10.4) 
• 6× Ubuntu workstations (22.04 TLS)
• 1× Windows 11