Interactive Lab

Chaos Engineering &
Resilient Virtualized Architecture

Inject real faults into a simulated Software-Defined Data Center edge network. Watch BFD/BGP failover, DPU offload physics, and recovery telemetry — all in your browser.

VMware NSX BFD / BGP DPU Offload SDDC Edge Chaos Engineering

What You're Simulating

Each component below maps to a real production construct in a Software-Defined Data Center edge deployment.

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Virtual Edge Router

NSX-T Tier-0 gateway running BGP peering with upstream physical fabric. Primary path for all north-south traffic.

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BFD / BGP Failover

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection detects link failure in <200 ms. BGP reconverges and reroutes traffic to the standby edge node.

DPU / SmartNIC Offload

Data Processing Unit moves packet processing off the host CPU. At 100 Gbps, offload keeps CPU at ~15% vs 98% without it.

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Digital Twin

A real-time software replica of the physical network. Chaos experiments run here first — before touching production.

Virtual Edge Node: Real-Time Digital Twin

Adjust traffic load, toggle DPU offload, then inject chaos. Watch the network react and recover.

SDDC Edge Cluster — Digital Twin v2
CLUSTER HEALTHY BGP ESTABLISHED BFD UP
Healthy node
Failed / fault
Failover active
Packet flow
DPU offload path
Simulated Traffic Load 50 Gbps
1 Gbps100 Gbps
DPU / SmartNIC Offload
Offload ON — CPU protected
Live Metrics
Host CPU 12%
Latency 0.8 ms
Packet Loss 0.00%
Failover Time — ms
📡 BFD / BGP Event Log

      

How Failover Works

Five stages from fault injection to full recovery — each mapped to real NSX-T and BGP primitives.

Fault Injection

Primary edge router process is killed. BFD hello packets stop arriving on the peer within the configured interval (300 ms default).

BFD Detection

BFD session transitions to DOWN state in <200 ms. Immediately signals the BGP process that the neighbor is unreachable.

BGP Reconvergence

BGP withdraws routes learned via the failed peer. Standby edge node's BGP session becomes the active path. Route tables update across the fabric.

Traffic Reroute

Dataplane switches to the standby edge node. Packet flow resumes. Total failover window: 150–300 ms with BFD; up to 90 s without it.

Recovery & Validation

Primary router restarts. BFD re-establishes. BGP re-advertises routes. Traffic load-balances back across both edge nodes.