Home > Workload Solutions > Container Platforms > Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform > Archive > Design Guide—Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.2 > Network design
Dell EMC networking products are designed for ease of use and to enable resilient network creation. OpenShift Container Platform 4.2 introduces various advanced networking features to enable containers for high performance and monitoring. Our recommended design follows these principles:
Container networking takes advantage of the high speed (25/100 GbE) network interfaces of the Dell EMC server portfolio. In addition, to meet network capacity requirements, you can use available CNI plug-ins to attach more networks to pods.
Additional networks are useful when network traffic isolation is required. Networking applications such as Container Network Functions (CNFs) have control traffic and data traffic. These different traffic types have different processing, security, and performance requirements.
Pods can be attached to the SR-IOV virtual function (VF) interface on the host system for traffic isolation and to increase I/O performance.
OpenShift Container Platform 4.2 introduced the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh. Users can monitor container traffic using Kiali and perform end-to-end tracing of applications using Jaeger.
Dual-homing means that each node that makes up the OpenShift cluster has at least two NICs, each connected to at least two switches. The switches require VLT connections so that together they operate as a single unit of connectivity to provide a redundant data path for all network traffic. The NICs at each node and the ports they connect to on each of the switches can make use of link aggregation bonding to assure HA operation.
Note: Dual-homing deployment is not currently possible with OpenShift Container Platform 4.2. It is likely that dual-homing will be enabled with the OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 release and we therefore recommend having the infrastructure in place to support it.
A nonblocking fabric is required to meet the needs of the microservices data traffic. Dell EMC recommends deploying a leaf-spine network.