FTAS details scale and convergence validation in 3.5

FTAS 3.5 extends validation for EVPN Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (LAN) (VXLAN) fabrics by expanding scale thresholds, adding deterministic convergence tests, and covering multi-VRF segmentation to verify control-plane and data-plane consistency for large multi-tenant data center environments.

Research overview

The release expands validation scope to examine scale behavior, failure recovery, and routing depth in EVPN Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) deployments.

Testing targets control-plane to forwarding-plane alignment and repeatable outcomes across dense, multi-tenant fabrics.

Key findings

Validation now covers up to 30,000 Monitoring-as-Code (MaC) and Automated Retraining Pipeline (ARP) entries and includes routing scale targets of up to 64,000 host routes and 128,000 prefix routes across IPv4 and IPv6 underlays.

Automated checks confirm EVPN Route Type 2 propagation and ARP cache synchronization across VTEPs, and verify that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) advertisements align with hardware forwarding state.

Technical breakdown

FTAS 3.5 adds automated state comparisons between control-plane tables and forwarding-plane entries to detect mismatches in route installation and ARP state.

Routing validation spans IPv4 numbered, IPv6 numbered, and IPv6 unnumbered underlay models, and includes validation of port-channel subinterfaces and BGP peering within multiple VRFs.

Operational impact

Convergence testing covers VTEP failure recovery, spine node failover, and uplink outage scenarios to measure recovery timing, forwarding stability, and packet loss characteristics.

These scenario tests aim to provide repeatable metrics for maintenance windows, software upgrades, and unplanned outages.

Monitoring and automation

Validation extends to operational visibility by exercising Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring paths alongside modern automation workflows to check stability under scale and failure conditions.

Automation hardening targets reduced regression flakiness and more deterministic test runs across the full stack from control plane through forwarding plane.

The release expands scale coverage, convergence testing, and segmentation validation so engineering and operations teams can verify control-plane and data-plane consistency in EVPN VXLAN fabrics at large scale. This Blog Signals brief is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.