Setup Guide

76 Dell EMC PowerEdge MX SmartFabric Configuration and Troubleshooting Guide
NOTE: No peer link is used between the Cisco ACI leaf switches. See the Cisco ACI documentation for more
information. Cisco recommends a minimum of three Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs) in a
production environment. For this validation effort, a single APIC, named APIC-1, is used.
All Dell EMC PowerEdge R730xd rack servers and MX compute sleds in this example are running VMware
ESXi 6.7.0. VMs named “web,” “app,” and “db” on the ESXi hosts are running Ubuntu Linux guest operating
systems. An optional jump box (shown in Figure 66), accessible over the OOB management network, is
added to assist with vCenter configuration.
The existing Cisco ACI environment has two PowerEdge R730xd rack servers directly connected to the ACI
leafs. These rack servers are in a VMware vSphere cluster, with a vCenter VM named mgmtvc01 located on
R730xd-01 as shown in Figure 66.
Integrating the MX environment into the Cisco ACI environment enables the four MX compute sleds in the two
chassis to join the existing VMware vSphere cluster. This allows all hosts and VMs to communicate using the
relevant networks.
The environment uses the six networks shown in Table 6.
Networks used
VLAN ID
VLAN name
Description
Network address
Gateway address
1611
ESXi_Mgmt
ESXi host in-band management
172.16.11.0/24
172.16.11.254
1612
vMotion
VM migration
172.16.12.0/24
172.16.12.254
1613
vSAN
Storage
172.16.13.0/24
172.16.13.254
1614
web
VM data network
172.16.14.0/24
172.16.14.254
1615
app
VM data network
172.16.15.0/24
172.16.15.254
1616
db
VM data network
172.16.16.0/24
172.16.16.254
NOTE: While the VMware vMotion and vSAN networks are configured in this example, their use is out of scope
for this guide.
VMs in the validated environment use the IP addresses shown in Table 7.
VM IP addresses
VM Name(s)
VLAN name
IP address(es)
mgmtvc01
ESXi_Mgmt
172.16.11.171
web01-web04
web
172.16.14.1-4
app01-app04
app
172.16.15.1-4
db01-db04
db
172.16.16.1-4