Dell Technologies recommends using a leaf-spine network in the data center with leaf switches configured as VLT peers. The figure below shows the switches and VxRail nodes in Rack 1 that are covered in this guide. The figure also shows how the leaf switches are incorporated into a data center’s leaf-spine network.
In the figure above, the Layer 2 or Layer 3 boundary is at the leafs, meaning traffic within each rack is switched (Layer 2) and traffic between racks is routed (Layer 3). VMware Validated Design recommends isolating vSAN traffic to its own Layer 2 VLAN. For this leaf-spine topology, each vSAN should be contained within a single rack. Since a VxRail cluster contains a vSAN, a VxRail cluster is also contained within a single rack.
The leaf-spine topology in the figure above scales to 16 racks or more, depending on the number of ports available in each spine. Racks may contain additional VxRail clusters, switches, servers, storage arrays, and other devices as needed.
To configure the remainder of the leaf-spine network, including spine switches, connections between leafs and spines, and routing protocols, see the Dell EMC Networking Layer 3 Leaf-Spine Deployment and Best Practices with OS10 document.