Minimum requirements for a Dell Technologies Enterprise SONiC with VxRail vSAN stretched cluster deployment include the following:
- At least four Dell PowerSwitch systems (listed in Table 1) are required as leaf switches. At least one leaf pair must be in Site 1, and at least one leaf pair must be in Site 2. Each switch in a pair must be the same model.
- All Dell PowerSwitch leaf and spine switches in the fabric must be running the same version of Dell Technologies Enterprise SONiC. Dell Technologies Enterprise SONiC 4.2 or later with an Enterprise Standard or Enterprise Premium bundle is required.
- One or more switches used as DCI switches are required. These switches can be Dell or third-party switches that meet industry Layer 2 and Layer 3 standards including BGP. They must also support a maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of at least 1600 bytes for VXLAN encapsulated packets. Dell Technologies recommends DCI switches support a maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of 9216 bytes for best performance. DCI switches must also meet the stretched cluster bandwidth and latency requirements specified in the Dell VxRail Architecture Overview and support port speeds compatible with the switches they are connected to.
- For OOB management connections, at least one 1000BASE-T switch is recommended. Dell Technologies recommends using one PowerSwitch N3248TE-ON per rack.
- VxRail nodes must meet the hardware and software requirements that are listed in the Dell VxRail 8.x support matrix. See your VxRail documentation for more information and other requirements.
- Onboard NICs in VxRail nodes must be 10 GbE, 25 GbE, or 100 GbE.
- One witness host running ESXi is required. The host must use the same ESXi version as the VxRail nodes and cannot be part of any vSAN-enabled cluster. One flash drive must be available for the vSAN cache tier and one or more additional drives must be available for the vSAN capacity tier.
- At least one DNS server is required. The server must be reachable from the VxRail External Management network and have host records added for this deployment.
- An NTP server reachable from the VxRail External Management network is recommended.