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Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide
Introduction Planning your data center network for VxRail
Introduction
VxRail hardware and the physical network infrastructure
VxRail clusters and nodes
Network switch
Data center network
VxRail networking port options
VxRail Ethernet adapter options
VxRail Fibre Channel adapter options
VxRail RoCE adapter options
VxRail node connectivity options
VxRail networking rules and restrictions
Topology and connections
VxRail cluster types VxRail feature-driven decision points VxRail hardware and switch selection decision points Prepare data center for VxRail implementation Planning the VxRail cluster implementation Planning for VxRail satellite nodes Configure the network for VxRail Preparing to build the VxRail cluster VxRail network considerations after implementation Appendix A: VxRail Network Configuration Table Appendix B: VxRail Passwords Appendix C: VxRail Cluster Setup Checklist Appendix D: VxRail Open Ports Requirements Appendix E: Virtual Distributed Switch Portgroup Default Settings Appendix F: Physical Network Switch Examples

VxRail RoCE adapter options

VxRail RoCE adapter options

  • RoCE adapter support Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) connectivity over Converged Networks. RDMA is a technology to enable sending data over a network without involving the CPU in the transfer, thereby providing appreciable IOPS performance in comparison to other network-based storage connectivity options. Enabling RDMA over a Converged Ethernet network infrastructure provides faster data transfer for network-intensive applications through lower I-O latencies on this network.

     Port Speed

    Vendor

    25 GbE

    Mellanox

    The following guidelines should be understood for RoCE-supported adapters:

    • The VxRail cluster must be configured with a minimum version of 7.0.200
    • All the nodes in the cluster connected to the common vSAN datastore must be configured with RoCE-supported adapter cards of the same vendor and the same model. This is encouraged as a best practice to remove any possibility of slight variances in adapters from different vendors or different models disrupting I/O on the vSAN datastore.
    • The Ethernet ports on the RoCE-supported adapters are reserved for vSAN traffic only.
    • The physical network supporting vSAN is configured as a ‘lossless’ network,

    VxRail DPU options

    VxRail supports Data Processing Units (DPUs) to accelerate I-O and boost overall performance. The DPUs support the offloading of certain network and security services from the main CPUs on the VxRail nodes, optimizing overall CPU resources.

    A DPU would be installed in the factory on the VxRail node instead of a standard Ethernet adapter card. The DPU differs from a traditional Ethernet adapter card because ESXio is installed on the device, and the DPU is configured with its own CPU.

    DiagramDescription automatically generated

    Figure 12.    Integrated DPU with ESXio image and CPU

    The following guidelines should be understood for VxRail clusters with DPUs:

    • The VxRail cluster must be running a minimum version of 8.0.010
    • The VxRail nodes are configured in the factory with qualified and supported Data Processing Units (DPUs)
    • The data center network supporting the VxRail cluster can support the physical network speed requirement of the DPU.

    Port Speed

    Vendor

    25 GbE

    nVidia

    Pensando

    100 GbE

    Pensando