How it works...

Many of the options can be left as the default values. The essential ones will have a red circle with an exclamation mark in it.

In these settings, No Local Switching has been selected (the default setting). With this setting, all traffic between VMs in the same EPG must flow through the leaf node, and VXLAN is the only encapsulation method available. This is also known as "FEX Enable Mode." This is not the recommended method.

The preferred method is Local Switching mode. Traffic between VMs in the same EPG is routed by the hypervisor instead of having to flow through the leaf node. Traffic between VMs in different EPGs will still need to flow through the leaf node, but there can still be considerable performance gains with local switching mode. Local switching mode can also use VLAN and VXLAN for encapsulation, and is referred to as "FEX Disable Mode."