The production topology uses a leaf-spine fabric for performance and scalability, as shown in the following figure. SmartFabric Services (SFS) automates the deployment of this fabric.
With SFS, two leaf switches are used in each rack for redundancy and performance. A Dell EMC Virtual-Link Trunking interconnect (VLTi) connects each pair of leaf switches. Every leaf switch has an L3 uplink to every spine switch. Equal-Cost Multi-Path routing (ECMP) is leveraged to utilize all available bandwidth on the leaf-spine connections.
SFS uses BGP-EVPN to stretch L2 networks across the L3 leaf-spine fabric. This method enables scalability of L3 networks with the virtual machine (VM) mobility benefits of an L2 network. For example, you can migrate a VM from one rack to another rack without the need to change its IP address and gateway information.
The example in this guide builds the SmartFabric shown in the preceding figure in four stages:
- Leaf switches Leaf1A and Leaf1B are deployed in Rack 1 without spine switches. A two-leaf fabric is initially created using SFS.
- The SFS uplink creation examples are shown for connectivity to the external network using either L2 or L3 uplinks. The external network is typically a preexisting network in the data center.
- Two spine switches, Spine1 and Spine2, are added to join the first rack with the second rack. Next, leaf switches Leaf2A and Leaf2B are added in Rack 2. The fabric is expanded to include the additional leafs and spines by using SFS.
- The onboarding procedures for various devices to the fabric are detailed. Onboarding examples include PowerEdge servers running ESXi, PowerEdge server running Windows, PowerStore-X and PowerStore-T storage appliances, and Isilon storage.