“Integrating physical bare-metal servers into a software-defined overlay network requires hardware switches that speak native OVSDB and VXLAN.”

At IBM, we integrated physical bare-metal database servers into VMware NSX overlay environments using Arista Hardware VTEPs.

OVSDB Protocol Peering

The physical Arista switch connects to the NSX Controller cluster using the OVSDB (Open vSwitch Database) management protocol:

1. OVSDB Schema Exchange: The Arista switch registers its physical interfaces (Ethernet1/1) as MAC-binding endpoints.
2. Dynamic MAC Learning: When a physical server emits a frame, Arista notifies NSX Controllers over OVSDB.
3. VXLAN Encapsulation: Arista switch hardware encapsulates raw Ethernet frames into VXLAN UDP packets at 10Gbps line rate.

# # Arista EOS OVSDB & VXLAN Configuration
cvx
 no shutdown
 !
interface Vxlan1
 vxlan source-interface Loopback1
 vxlan udp-port 4789
 vxlan vlan 100 vni 10050

[!NOTE] Hardware VTEP integration offloads packet encapsulation from host CPUs to physical switch ASICs.

The Verdict

Key Takeaway

Use Hardware VTEPs for Bare-Metal Cloud Integration.

Bridging physical servers into software-defined networks requires OVSDB-compliant switches. Hardware VTEP integration delivers low-latency line-rate performance for non-virtualized database workloads.