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Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

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Network switch

A VxRail cluster depends on the adjacent ToR Ethernet switches to support cluster operations. VxRail is compatible with most Ethernet switches. Select a switch that meets the operational and performance criteria for your use cases.

The Ethernet switch does not need to support L3 services or be licensed for L3 services. You can enable routing services further upstream on the network infrastructure or at the ToR switch.

A VxRail cluster can be deployed in a flat network using the default VLAN on the switch. You can configure all management, storage, and guest networks to be segmented by VLANs for efficient operations. For best results in a production environment, deploy only managed switches and VLANs. A VxRail cluster that is built on a flat network should be used temporarily or for test cases.

Basic switch requirements

  • If the VxRail cluster includes adapters that support RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) for VMware vSAN storage connectivity, the supporting network must support a lossless transport. A lossless network is defined as one where no frames are dropped because of network congestion.
  • Select switches that support Data Center Bridging (DCB). Data Center Bridging supports the elimination of packet loss due to buffer or queue overflow. The DCB must support bandwidth allocation that is based on priority settings, which are known as Class of Service (CoS).
  • Priority Flow Control (PFC) is required on the switches to provide RoCE traffic a higher priority than other network traffic.

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