Using VXLAN in an active-standby data center setup

[cttripp1]

So, I inherited a network with HPE 5940 switches running VXLAN between two data centers.  The problem is that VXLAN works well with an active-active data center setup, but isn't really set up for an active-standby setup (at least, based on what I've read).

Without getting into lots of detail, currently we have a very convoluted solution for bringing up the standby data center.  During normal operations, the VXLANs between the two DCs are "down", meaning the service instances are not configured under the bridge interfaces that connect our servers to the network.  We call this "unmerged" VXLAN; it basically means VXLAN isn't advertising the servers IP or MAC addresses across the WAN.  This allows the two data centers to run side-by-side without IP address conflicts.

In an outage, we first down the servers in the active datacenter.  Then, we "merge" the VXLAN, meaning we manually add the service instances to the bridge interfaces that connect our servers to the network in the standby data center, while simultaneously manually migrating the IP gateway address to the standby data center.  Then we can bring the servers up in the standby data center using the same IP addresses without address conflicts.

There's a lot of other stuff going on during a fail-over which I haven't mentioned here, but suffice to say, this manual process is a pain.  I could script it, but I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar situation using VXLAN in an active-standby setup.

Corporate policy won't let me go to an active-active setup, which would be the most straight-forward solution.

Thanks for any ideas.