Dell EMC VMware Cloud Foundation for PowerEdge MX7000 Deployment Guide

There are two different approaches to configuring the network switches used in this deployment guide. The first approach is the manually configured approach where a startup-configuration is built up by manually configuring the ports, VLANs, aggregations (physical and virtual), assigning tagging rules, QoS, and other settings typical to this type of deployment.

The other approach is to use Dell EMC SmartFabric which uses a simplified, reusable approach to configure the switches on the PowerEdge MX7000 chassis and assign those configurations to the compute resources in the chassis.

The advantage of using the manual configuration method is that every aspect of the switch configuration is available. The switch startup-configuration reflects every change that is made by the network administrator but this method is slower to deploy and more prone to human error.

The advantage of SmartFabric is in the time it takes to deploy a configuration. With a relatively small number of configuration steps, a fabric and profile that can be assigned to the compute sleds are created. When a change is made to the fabric or profile, it can be easily pushed out to the switches and compute sleds in the PowerEdge MX7000 chassis. The startup-config and running-config commands do not reflect the actual configuration of the chassis switches.

Review the sections in both Manual switch configuration and SmartFabric network configuration before choosing a path.