Network Features

Support Virtual Routing & Forwarding (VRF) to support private, overlapping Layer 3 connectivity leveraging a customer's own public or private IPv4 blocks. Enable support on dedicated ports as well as shared ports.

Cloud-inspired load balancer service for distributing traffic to Metal servers and appliances. At launch, Equinix Metal's Load Balancers will support users deploying a fully managed L3/L4 network load balancing from the Metal portal interface. Load Balancers will initially support public traffic on the ingress virtual IP (VIP). No private NAT or network traffic for real servers will be supported at launch.

Enable customers to create and connect Colo with Virtual Devices through a multipoint-to-multipoint EVPLAN broadcast domain within and across metros.

The ability to support double tagged or stacked tags to match Equinix Fabric network design. Some service provider use cases require the ability to operate with inner and outer tags.

Support mixed Layer2 + Layer3 mode while keeping bonded ports for High Availability. Support for both L3 (Internet VLAN) and L2 (private VLANs) on a single LACP bond. This would be implemented as a new interface configuration called “hybrid bonded” - which would be made available from customer and staff portals and APIs.

To meet security requirements while still providing a low cost VPN solution to access private networks on Metal, we should de-couple Doorman VPN from the Metal platform and provide as an Open Source solution that customers can deploy in a secure, single tenant fashion.