The example in this guide deploys the production topology shown in the figure below.

Note: The deployment examples in this guide use two network adapter ports per server for production network connections, as shown in the figure above.

The production topology in this deployment guide uses a leaf-spine SmartFabric in Site 1, and a two-leaf SmartFabric in Site 2.

SmartFabric Services (SFS) automates the deployment of these two fabrics. With SFS, two leaf switches are used in each rack for redundancy and performance. A Virtual-Link Trunking interconnect (VLTi) connects each pair of SmartFabric leaf switches. In Site 1, every leaf switch has an L3 uplink to every spine switch. Equal-Cost Multi-Path routing (ECMP) is leveraged to use all available bandwidth on the leaf-spine connections.

SFS uses BGP-EVPN to stretch L2 networks across the L3 leaf-spine fabric. With the new multisite fabric interconnect, L2 networks are also stretched across Sites. BGP-EVPN allows for the scalability of L3 networks with the VM mobility benefits of an L2 network. For example, a VM can be migrated from one rack to another, or from one site to another, without the need to change its IP address and gateway information.

Hosts in the vSAN stretched cluster are in Sites 1 and 2, and are named esx01-esx07. The witness host, named witness01, is deployed in Site 3. The services host, named esx-svcs01, is installed in Site 1. It is the initial host for the DNS, NTP, and vCenter servers. The services host is also the permanent location for OMNI in this deployment example.

Note: The OMNI VM may be deployed to any ESXi host in the topology provided it has a network connection to the vCenter server and an out-of-band management connection to the SmartFabric switches. The services host is used in this deployment to provide these two connections.

Networks configured on the production topology include Management (in-band), vMotion, vSAN, and other VM networks as needed.