The management fabric provides out-of-band (OOB) management connectivity, local or remote, into the AI infrastructure (switches) and devices like storage appliances and servers.
The OOB connections range from simple iDRAC connections from the servers, management interfaces from the storage appliance, and networking devices. The link speed of these connections is 1GbE using Cat-RJ45 copper cables.
Figure 22 shows the OOB connections from all the devices in the Dell AI environment.
The AI OOB fabric uses the PowerSwitch N3248TE-ON. This switch supports Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching, and the switch port speeds are 1GbE. The Dell PowerSwitch N3248TE-ON has four 10GbE SFP ports that can be used to uplink onto the legacy or existing network.
The following networking guidelines can be applied when deploying the OOB Ethernet fabric:
- Both types of fabrics (Layer 2 and/or Layer 3) are supported on the Dell PowerSwitch N3248TE-ON switch.
- If the OOB management fabric is based purely on Layer 2, then all N3248TE-ON switchports are assigned to a single VLAN or a small number of VLANs. These VLANs are then trunked over the 10GbE SFP uplink ports on the N3248TE-ON and transmitted upstream to be routed by a different device.
- Spanning-tree should be enabled as a best practice whenever Layer 2 is being deployed.
- If the OOB management fabric is based purely on Layer 3, then very likely the connections from the N3248TE-ON are Layer 3 point-to-point using a /31 subnet IP address scheme. These IP addresses are then routed throughout the OOB management fabric providing remote access into the AI environment.
The 10GbE SFP uplink ports are still used to connect onto an existing network providing external access into the AI environment.