OTV and LISP are two interesting new data center technologies that are worth examining when you are studying for a Cisco Data Center certification, such as CCNP or CCIE Data Center. Unfortunately, not everybody can afford a couple of Nexus 7000s to play with. As an instructor for Fast Lane I regularly have access to Nexus based labs, but I still thought that it would be nice to have a lab setup of my own to experiment with. Fortunately, there is now a very nice way to get some hands-on experience with these protocols through the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v, which I blogged about earlier.

The CSR 1000v is based on the same IOS XE code that runs on the ASR 1000, which supports both OTV and LISP. So I decided to try to build a lab to test VM mobility using OTV and LISP in my home lab using a number of CSR 1000v instances. Continue reading →