Owner's Manual

Introduction

This document describes the Active Fabric Controller (AFC) and its role in the active fabric solution. The

controller automatically discovers the physical topology of the fabric and uses a topology-specific

forwarding scheme to provide multi-path support and forwarding between endpoints using the shortest

path. AFC manages the switching nodes within the fabric to provide loop-free forwarding and high

resiliency. You can use programmable application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by the

controller to manage other components within the active fabric.

Supported Platforms

The AFC is supported on the following Dell Networking switches:

• S4810

• S4820T

• S6000

• MXL

• Input/Output Aggregator (IOA)

How the Active Fabric Works

Active fabric is a system of network components connecting virtual and physical server and storage

devices. Each cluster of switches at the edge of the network is a domain. The fabric connects the

controller software components using the edge ports of the switches. The switches connect to each

other using internal ports. Elements connected to the fabric are considered end points; the ports

connecting the end points to the controller are considered middle boxes.

The term active fabric is used collectively to refer to all networking components used by frames that are

transferred to or from a virtual machine (VM), a physical device to or from another VM, or a physical

device in the converged infrastructure. This includes:

• the chassis or rack interconnect switch, or top of rack (ToR)

• the switch in the chassis

• the converged network adapter (CNA)

• the virtual switch

The active fabric is treated as the logical equivalent of a network node. Active fabric systems are

comprised of the following components:

• Orchestration engine (such as the Dell OpenStack ml2 mechanism driver)

• Centralized control and management provided by the software-defined network (SDN)

• Switches (either inter- or intra-chassis)

In a multi-tenant environment, the active fabric provides the following logical components:

Introduction