Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 includes SmartFabric Services (SFS). With SFS, customers can quickly and easily deploy and automate data center networking fabrics.

SFS Personalities

SFS has two personalities:

• VxRail Layer 2 (L2) Single Rack personality – the original (legacy) SFS personality, automates configuration of a single pair of ToR (or leaf) switches for VxRail clusters
• Layer 3 (L3) Fabric personality – the new SFS personality available as of OS10.5.0.5, automates configuration of a leaf-spine fabric

VxRail L2 Single Rack personality

Note: For new single rack and multi-rack SFS deployments, Dell requires using the L3 Fabric personality instead of the VxRail L2 Single Rack personality.

The VxRail L2 Single Rack personality is the original SFS personality generally available in OS10 releases from 10.4.1.4 to 10.5.0.5. It is enabled by running a Python script in the OS10 Linux shell.

This personality is limited to a single rack and cannot be expanded to a multi-rack deployment at this time. If switches with this personality enabled are upgraded to OS10.5.0.5, they will continue to operate with the VxRail L2 Single Rack personality.

Note: The VxRail L2 Single Rack personality is not covered in this deployment guide. It is covered in the VMware Integration for VxRail Fabric Automation SmartFabric User Guide, Release 1.1. Please refer to the Dell EMC VxRail Support Matrix (account required) for supported software versions and the migration capability from the VxRail Single Rack L2 personality to the L3 Fabric Personality.

L3 Fabric personality

Note: Dell requires using the L3 Fabric personality for new SFS deployments. All examples in this guide use this personality. Unless otherwise specified, statements in this guide regarding SmartFabric behavior and features are applicable to the L3 Fabric personality only.

With OS10.5.0.5, the new L3 Fabric Personality is introduced. It allows users to deploy SmartFabric Services in a single rack and expand to multi-rack as business needs evolve.

The SFS L3 Fabric personality automatically builds an L3 leaf-spine fabric. This enables faster time to production for hyper-converged and private cloud environments while being fully interoperable with existing data center infrastructure.

Figure 1.              From a network of boxes to a networked fabric

The SFS L3 Fabric build process is as follows:

1. Rack and cable leaf and spine switches
2. Enable SFS from the OS10 CLI with the smartfabric l3fabric enable role [options] command
   1. Specify the role (leaf or spine)
   2. Specify Virtual Link Trunking interconnect (VLTi) ports on leafs
3. Switches boot in SmartFabric mode
4. Switches discover each other using LLDP
5. Switches elect one of the leaf nodes as the SmartFabric master
6. Leaf and spine connections are established using private IP addresses and external Border Gateway Protocol (eBGP)
7. Leaf Nodes are configured as hardware VTEPs for the infrastructure network overlay using BGP EVPN

Figure 2.              SFS Layer 3 leaf-spine fabric