Dell EMC Big Cloud Fabric Deployment and Best Practices Guide with VMware vSAN

Published November 2017

Applications are the engines for modern businesses. They drive innovation, operational efficiency, and revenue generation. They demand an infrastructure that is highly agile and easy to manage while reducing costs. These applications, which include mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, multitier web applications, and big data, have placed new constraints on the networking infrastructure. Support for high east-west traffic bandwidth, virtual machine mobility, and multitenancy is critical.

Infrastructure teams have struggled to respond to these requirements. Unlike the rest of the portfolio, legacy networks remain highly static and require extensive manual intervention and operational overhead. To overcome these challenges, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is garnering due attention. SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane, allowing for dynamic management of the network. The advantages of SDN include agility, scalability, and superior network management. Open standards prevent lock-in with a single vendor and allow for financial flexibility. With such benefits, SDN solves emerging networking problems in the data center and helps keep up with virtualized environments. By providing various open networking hardware platforms and your choice of networking OS, Dell EMC Networking is the choice for future-ready data centers.

This guide covers an underlay (physical network) deployment for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) based on the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Virtualization with the VMware vSAN use case. The goal of this guide is to enable a network administrator or engineer with traditional networking and VMware ESXi experience to build a scalable network using the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Virtualization and Big Switch Networks’ software outlined in this guide.

This document provides a best practice leaf-spine network topology with step-by-step configuration of a Big Cloud Fabric SDN solution integrated with VMware. It also includes an overview of the VMware distributed switches, clusters, and vSANs used in this environment.

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