Home > Workload Solutions > Virtual Desktop Infrastructure > White Papers > Technical White Paper—VDI Graphics Acceleration on a Dell MX7000 Modular Chassis > Network guidance for an MX7000 VDI environment
The MX scalable fabric architecture ties multiple MX7000 chassis into a single network domain that behaves like a single logical chassis from a networking perspective. A scalable fabric consists of two main components: a pair of MX9116n Fabric Switching Engines (FSE) and additional pairs of MX7116n Fabric Expander Modules (FEM) that are used to connect remote chassis to the FSEs. This is a hardware-enabled architecture and it applies if the switch is running in either Full Switch or Fabric modes.
A total of ten MX7000 chassis are supported in a scalable fabric. The following figure shows the networking configuration of the MX7000 chassis used in this solution. Fabric slots A1/A2 are used for VDI compute infrastructure networking. The B1/B2 fabric slots are used by Amulet Hotkey CoreModules that contain the NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Fabric slots C1/C2 are designated for optional Fiber Channel switches. Fiber Channel options leveraging slots C1/C2 for external block storage are possible but are not within the scope of this document.
Amulet Hotkey CoreModules use the fabric B1 and B2 slots in the MX7000 chassis, meaning that they are not available for networking purposes. For this reason, the networking architecture for the MX7000 chassis hosting the VDI compute nodes must use a single fabric design leveraging slots A1 and A2. For more information about networking configurations, see the PowerEdge MX I/O Guide.