Your spine device is supporting your leaf switches connectivity. It needs the features that will allow your underlay routing of choice to provide full reachability of all interfaces/loopbacks you intend to use to build the VXLAN overlay on and it needs to support the physical media depending on the connectivity types/speed. Typically the spine is going to be high speed connectivity for east/west traffic. You would be using leaf switches to bring connectivity in from the user traffic connecting into the overlay, you're north/south traffic.

Great I'm glad it helped you! Good luck with your BGP EVPN research.

I will come back to it soon, it has been far too long...

Some applications/storage solutions still use L2 would be one use case. Ideally you would leave the L2 domain at the top of rack and keep it simple but it all depends on the needs.

Hey Terry, welcome to the world of Networking! All the best with your new role. It can be a bit overwhelming to start but keep making consistent steps forward.

That's cool, glad it helped you out!

Hey, on a different switches it is possible to have two different vlan ID but make them belong to same VNI. Probably not a good thing to do but possible to configure and communicate across. If you configured two different VLANs on different switches and make them use two different VNI then you wouldn't have layer 2 Comms on them. The same goes if you used the same VLAN on different switches but used different VNI for this VLAN on each switch, you wouldn't get layer two Comms between them. This is providing you are using VXLAN tunneling to communicate and not using a trunk between the switches.

Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful

Thanks for watching, sorry I do want to come back to this and resume the channel.

Yes as long as you have end to end reachability you can use anything to do the underlay routing. consider you will not have dynamic routing for fail over though so your tunnels will only form over the static path.

Hey sorry for the delay, I haven't been involved with using three tiers aka using "super spines" generally it allows you to scale further. The VTEP is still at the leaf so you are effectively adding more bandwidth to a solution is my understanding. VXLAN is able to be built out over an IP network as long as your edge devices support the VXLAN features. You also need to consider Multicast or Ingress replication on your legacy IP network acting as the underlay. If you are trying to build out a VXLAN design on a legacy 3-tier design I would suggest adding another distribution layer off your core or connect to the core with a new VXLAN designed focused on a well supported design approach like a CLOS topology. For your gateway question using distributed anycast IP, this will act as your gateway. The IP address is identical on all your switches and has the same MAC address defined this is configured consistently for each of your VXLAN. This will allow the host to arrive on any of your switches and able to use the default gateway based on the information the host has already cached. How you route that over tunnels can be done using symmetric or asymmetric IRB which you should understand. I do not have any configuration I can share for this, however there are many good examples using Google that break down sections of the configuration

I think studying for a CCNA is a good starting point. Be sure to do as much practical lab work as possible instead of reading a book for a test, it might feel long winded but it will certainly progress you so much faster. Use GNS3 to do your lab work. Jeremy Cioara used to do great videos on the CCNA, he is very clear and entertaining too I found. CBT Nuggets is a subscription service where you can generally find his stuff, but he has a KZbin channel and I'm sure you can find his content if you search for it. Your programming logic will come in handy in the future, there is still alot buzz around SDN and automation, there isn't a platform that can do it all yet. Let me know how you get on.

Hi Sarvesh, The book Building Data Centers with VXLAN BGP EVPN: A Cisco NX-OS Perspective is very good and the only book I have gone through for this. Other than that I have used odd bits off Google searches and blogs.