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This section provides an overview of the network architecture, including compute and management server connectivity, and configuration details for the ToR and virtual switches.
The network architecture employs a VLT connection between the two ToR switches. The inherent redundancy of a non-VLT environment requires standby equipment, which drives up infrastructure costs and increases risks. In a VLT environment, all paths are active, adding immediate value and throughput while still protecting against hardware failures. VLT technology enables a server or bridge to uplink a physical trunk into more than one Networking S5232-ON switch by treating the uplink as one logical trunk. A VLT-connected pair of switches acts as a single switch to a connecting bridge or server. Both links from the bridge network can actively forward and receive traffic. VLT provides a replacement for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)-based networks by providing both redundancy and full bandwidth utilization by using multiple active paths. The major benefits of VLT technology are:
The Dell EMC Networking S5232-ON switches each provide six 40/100 GbE uplink ports. The VLT interconnect (VLTi) configuration in this architecture uses two 40/100 GbE ports from each ToR switch to provide a 200 GB data path between the switches.
The following figure illustrates the Networking S5232-ON VLTi configuration.
Figure 7. Networking S5232-ON VLTi configuration
Hyper-V Virtual Switch is a software-based layer-2 Ethernet network switch that is available in Hyper-V Manager when you install the Hyper-V server role. Hyper-V Virtual Switch includes programmatically managed and extensible capabilities to connect VMs to both virtual networks and the physical network. In addition, Hyper-V Virtual Switch provides policy enforcement for security, isolation, and service levels.
Hyper-V Virtual Switch provides:
The following figure shows the virtual distributed switch configuration for the management and compute servers. As shown in the diagram, hba0 and hba1 connect to the Connectrix switch.
Figure 8. Distributed Virtual Switch for dual port configuration
Dell EMC recommends using Hyper-V Integration Services, a suite of utilities in Microsoft Hyper-V that is designed to enhance the performance of a VM’s guest operating system. The Integration Services suite improves VM management by replacing generic operating system driver files for the mouse, keyboard, video, network, and SCSI controller components. This suite also synchronizes time between the guest and host operating systems and can provide file interoperability and a cluster heartbeat.