Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > Guides > Design Guide—VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for High-Performance Database Applications > Network design
Dell EMC Open Networking disaggregates the hardware from the operating system, giving you the choice of picking the operating system that best fits your unique network infrastructure needs. Open Networking is achieved by using standards-based building blocks that use open source where possible.
The Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), an open-source project within the Open Computer Project, provides an installation environment for bare-metal networking switches. ONIE also provides the option to install different network operating systems on a common set of networking hardware. ONIE is like any operating system boot loader for Windows or Linux and uses the same GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) structure that is commonly found in Linux distributions.
In the Dell EMC Networking portfolio, any switch model with an “-ON” suffix, such as the Dell EMC Networking Z9264F-ON and the Dell EMC Networking S5248F-ON switches, has ONIE enabled.
For information about ONIE, see http://onie.org/.
The network architecture employs a VLT connection between the two ToR switches. The inherent redundancy of a non-VLT environment requires standby equipment, which increases infrastructure costs and risks. In a VLT environment, all paths are active, adding immediate value and throughput while protecting against hardware failures. VLT technology enables a server or bridge to uplink a physical trunk into more than one Networking S5248F-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 forward and receive traffic.
VLT provides a replacement for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)-based networks by using multiple active paths to provide both redundancy and full bandwidth utilization. The major benefits of VLT technology are:
The Dell EMC Networking S5248F-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 S5248F-ON VLTi configuration:
Figure 7. Networking S5248F-ON VLTi configuration