EVB is an IEEE standard that enables you to coordinate the configuration and management of a virtualized networking environment between an end station running Oracle Solaris and the external SEFOS bridge. EVB extends network virtualization features into the physical network infrastructure, enabling you to manage bandwidth and to increase utilization resources.
EVB defines protocols for an end station to exchange configuration information about its VNICs to SEFOS. This situation helps in automating configuration, and avoids the need to configure VNICs on an end station and also manually configuring the external bridge appropriately (typically these bridges are administered by different administrators).
VM to VM communication over a port can happen in two ways:
Packets can be looped back within the host (VEB)
Packets can be sent to the external switch and looped back (VEPA)
EVB enables a switch to indicate whether it supports reflective relay, if the switch does, it advertises its state (enabled or disabled). An EVB station can request the EVB switch to enable or disable the reflective relay feature based on its configuration, whether VM-VM traffic should be looped back internally or externally.
Note - The current implementation on SEFOS only supports VEB and does not support VEPA, and is only compatible with the Oracle Solaris implementation of EVB. In addition, the current implementation of EVB only supports MTU sizes of 1500 and 9000. VNICs or VSIs created with any other MTU size will not be accepted by SEFOS.