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Starting with the release of the EX-Series appliances, a redundant pair of dedicated back-end management switches are used. By moving to new appliance switch gear, ECS is now able to adopt a front- and back-end switching mode of configuration.
The EX500, EX5000, and EXF900 appliances use the Dell S5248F for the front-end pair of switches and for the pair of back-end switches. EXF900 appliances use the S5232F for the aggregation back-end switches. Customers have the option of using their own front-end switches instead of the Dell switches.
Dell offers an optional HA pair of front-end 25 GbE S5248F switches for customer network connection to the rack. It has two 200GbE (QSFP28-DD) virtual link trunking (VLT) cables per HA pair. These switches are called the Hare and the Rabbit switches. The following figure shows a visual representation of how ports are intended to be used to enable ECS node traffic and customer uplink ports.
Dell provides two 25 GbE S5248F back-end switches with two 200GbE (QSFP28-DD) VLT cables. These switches are referred to as the Hound and Fox switches. All iDRAC cables from nodes and all front-end switch management cable connections route to the Fox switch. The following figure provides a visual representation of how ports are intended to be used to enable ECS management traffic and diagnostic ports. These port allocations are standard across all implementations.
Dell provides two 100GbE S5232F back-end aggregation switches (AGG1 and AGG2) with four 100GbE VLT cables. These switches are referred to as the Falcon and Eagle switches. In the following figure, all labeled ports indicate the port designations. This configuration allows you to connect to seven racks of EXF900 nodes.
For more information about the networking and cabling, see the ECS EX Series Hardware Guide.