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Dell Configuration Guide for the S4048–ON System 9.14.2.5

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Optimizing the Boot Time

You can reduce the booting time of a switch by using the fast boot feature. With the reduced time that is taken to reboot the switch, upon a manually-initiated reload or an expected restart of the device, there is minimal disruption in the traffic that is managed by the switch. Traffic outage is lowered considerably (reduced to approximately 25 seconds in certain network deployments) when you enable this optimization method while booting the device. By reducing the duration of traffic loss, the subscriber sessions are processed and preserved in an effective and seamless way.

You can configure this capability on the switch that is deployed as a top-of-rack (ToR) switch. The ToR switch is the single point of connection to the network for servers in that rack. This functionality of minimized reload time is supported in a network deployment in which the servers are connected through a ToR, leaf and spine unit or configuration setup. An exterior border gateway protocol (EBGP) session exists between the ToR and leaf switch units, and between the leaf and spine units or nodes.

Booting Process When Optimized Boot Time Mechanism is Enabled

When device running Dell EMC Networking OS earlier than Release 9.3(0.0) is reloaded, the CPU and other components on the board are reset at the same time. Therefore, the control plane and the forwarding plane are impacted immediately. After the system boots up and re-initializes, the interfaces come up, control plane protocols are reestablished, and the network topology information (such as routes, adjacency settings) is learned and installed before the traffic resumes. In a typical network scenario, a traffic disconnection of 150 seconds or more usually occurs. When you employ the optimized booting functionality, the traffic outage duration is reduced drastically.

Guidelines for Configuring Optimized Booting Mechanism

Keep the following points and limitations in mind when you configure the fast boot capability:

  • Fast boot is supported only when you perform an expected, stipulated reload by using the reload-type normal-reload command in Global Configuration mode or by using the reset command in uBoot mode on a switch that is running Dell EMC Networking OS Release 9.3(0.0) or later, or when you perform a planned upgrade (and not an abrupt or unexpected shutdown) from an older release of Dell EMC Networking OS to Release 9.3(0.0) or later. Dell EMC recommends that you do not downgrade your system from Release 9.3(0.0) to an earlier release that does not support the fast boot functionality because the system behavior is unexpected and undefined.

  • Fast boot uses the Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) utility that is enabled on the Intel CPU on the device to enhance the speed of the system startup. SMP is supported on the device.

For the fast boot feature to reduce the traffic disruption significantly, the following conditions apply:

  1. When LACP is used between the ToR switch and the adjacent devices, LACP is configured on these adjacent devices with a timeout value of 90 seconds or longer.

  2. BGP timers between the ToR switch and adjacent devices are set to high values (for example, a hold timeout of 180 seconds) unless BGP graceful restart is used.

  3. Before performing the planned reload, we recommend that the IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND) reachable timer is increased to a value of 300 seconds or longer on the adjacent devices to prevent the ND cache entries from becoming stale and being removed while the ToR goes through a CPU reset. This timer can be restored to its prior value after the ToR has completed its planned reload.

  4. The BGP protocol on the adjacent devices responds to network (link-state) changes and route advertisements quickly and propagates these further up the network quickly. You might need to adjust the BGP timers on these devices.

  5. Note that fast boot will operate even if some of the preceding conditions are not met. However, the duration of traffic loss might be longer.

  6. Warm boot is supported because it enables faster convergence and reduced traffic loss.

  7. BGP graceful restart must be configured with GR time left to default (120 seconds) or higher. The BGP hold timer should be configured as 10 seconds.

  8. You must configure the LACP long timeout, which is the amount of time that a LAG interface waits for a PDU from the remote system before bringing the LACP session down, to be higher than the default value.

  9. Traffic from North-South and South-North nodes are of line rate type.

  10. Traffic outage for a planned reboot is less than 30 seconds for 4000 routes of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic for all of the following traffic directions.

  • South-North

  • North-South

  • East-West

  • West-East

To the south of ToR switch, 96 servers can be linked. Up to 8 Multiprocotol BGP (MP-BGP) sessions to the servers are established. You can configure a minimum of 2 MP-BGP sessions and a maximum of 8 MP-BGP sessions.

To the north of the ToR switch, up to 8 leaf nodes are connected. Up to 8 EBGP sessions for IPv4 and IPv6 for each leaf node are configured. LACP is enabled between the ToR and leaf nodes, and the LACP long timer is set to the default value. You must configure 96 ports to be 10-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and 8 ports as 40-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. You must configure the switch to operate with an uplink speed of 40 Gigabit Ethernet per second.


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