In this scenario, two MX7000 chassis are joined to an existing Cisco ACI environment. The MX solution consists of two MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine (FSEs), two MX7116n Fabric Expander Modules (FEMs) and two MX750c compute sleds on each chassis.
The connections between the ACI environment and the MX chassis are made using a double-sided multichassis link aggregation group (MLAG). MLAGs are called vPC on Cisco ACI and VLT on PowerEdge MX.
All devices in the validated environment are connected as shown in the following figure:
While a production ACI environment has multiple Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs), this example uses a single APIC (APIC-1).
All Dell PowerEdge rack servers and MX compute sleds in this example are running VMware ESXi 7.0. To install ESXi on PowerEdge servers, follow the instructions provided in the VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x Dell PowerEdge Servers Installation Instructions and Important Information Guide.
VMs named App, Web, and DB on the ESXi hosts are running Ubuntu Linux. A third rack server is used to assist with vCenter configuration and is accessible over the OOB management network.
The Cisco ACI environment has three PowerEdge rack servers that are directly connected to the ACI leafs. These rack servers are in a VMware vSphere cluster, with a vCenter VM named Jump Box on a rack server, as shown in the figure above.
The environment uses the six networks that are shown in the following table:
VLAN ID | VLAN name | Description | Network address | Gateway address |
1611 | ESXi_Mgmt | ESXi host in-band management | 172.16.11.0/24 | 172.16.11.254 |
1612 | vMotion | VM migration | 172.16.12.0/24 | 172.16.12.254 |
1613 | vSAN | Storage | 172.16.13.0/24 | 172.16.13.254 |
1614 | app | VM data network | 172.16.14.0/24 | 172.16.14.254 |
1615 | web | VM data network | 172.16.15.0/24 | 172.16.15.254 |
1616 | db | VM data network | 172.16.16.0/24 | 172.16.16.254 |
VMs in the validated environment use the IP addresses shown in the following table:
VM name | VLAN name | IP address |
MGMT | ESXi_Mgmt | 172.16.11.50/24 |
App01-App04 | App | 172.16.14.1-4/24 |
Web01-Web04 | Web | 172.16.15.1-4/24 |
db01-db04 | db | 172.16.16.1-4/24 |