Setup Guide

5 Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 Switch Configuration Guide for VxRail 4.7
1 Introduction
Our vision at Dell EMC is to be the essential infrastructure company from the edge, to the core, and to the
cloud. Dell EMC Networking ensures modernization for today’s applications and for the emerging cloud-native
world. Dell EMC is committed to disrupting the fundamental economics of the market with an open strategy
that gives you the freedom of choice for networking operating systems and top-tier merchant silicon. The Dell
EMC strategy enables business transformations that maximize the benefits of collaborative software and
standards-based hardware, including lowered costs, flexibility, freedom, and security. Dell EMC provides
further customer enablement through validated deployment guides which demonstrate these benefits while
maintaining a high standard of quality, consistency, and support.
VxRail sits at the forefront of a fundamental shift in IT infrastructure consumption – away from application-
specific, “build-your-own” infrastructure and toward virtualized, general-purpose, engineered systems. Dell
EMC and VMware have embraced this shift with the VxRail hyperconverged appliance. VxRail has a simple,
scale-out architecture that uses VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN to provide server virtualization and
software-defined storage.
To take full advantage of the VxRail solution, one must carefully consider the network that not only connects
multiple nodes into a single cohesive cluster but also enables connectivity to the customer’s IT environment.
Numerous industry studies have shown that networking is the primary source of both deployment issues and
poor performance of hyperconverged solutions. Usually, VxRail clusters (minimum of three and maximum of
64 nodes) connect to a preexisting IP network at the customer site. The inclusion of dedicated switches for
the VxRail cluster simplifies this process and avoids many of the network connectivity pitfalls associated with
the deployment of a hyperconverged solution.
The audience for this document includes professional services or onsite IT personnel responsible for the
deployment of a VxRail cluster when a pair of dedicated Dell EMC PowerSwitches is purchased with the
cluster. This document covers the process of connecting a cluster of VxRail nodes to:
• A pair of Dell PowerSwitches configured for Virtual Link Trunking (VLT), using VLT as the preferred
topology
• A pair of Dell PowerSwitches not configured for VLT
• A single Dell PowerSwitch
This document provides switch topology options and configuration examples for a VxRail 4.7 cluster using
nodes built on 14th generation (14G) PowerEdge servers. Nodes in these examples use 25GbE network
adapters. Switches in this guide use Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10.5.