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Public (production or front-end) switches are used for data transfer to and from customer applications as well as internal node-to-node communication for Gen1/2 and Gen3 EX300, 500, 3000, 5000 series. The inter- node traffic of Gen3 EXF900 will go through inside the private switch. These switches connect to the ECS nodes in the same rack. For Gen1/2 appliances, two 10 GbE, 24-port or 52-port Arista switches are used. For Gen3 appliances, two 10/25 GbE (EX300) or two 25 GbE (EX500, EX3000, EX5000 and EXF900) 48-port Dell switches are used. To create a High Availability (HA) network for the nodes in the rack, the public switches work in tandem using LACP/MLAG, with the Arista switches in Gen1/2 appliances, and Virtual Link Trunking (VLT), with the Dell switches in Gen3 appliances. This pairing is for redundancy and resiliency in case of a switch failure.
Across all generations of hardware, Gen1-3, each ECS node has two Ethernet ports that directly connect to one of the ToR public switches. Due to NIC bonding, the individual connections of a node appear to the outside world as one. The nodes are assigned IP addresses from the customer’s network either statically or through a DHCP server. At a minimum, one uplink between each ToR public switch in the ECS appliance to the customer network is required. The public switch management ports connect to the ToR private switch or switches.
Best practices: