Deployment Guide

6 VCF on VxRail Multirack Deployment using BGP EVPN

1 Introduction

Our vision at Dell EMC is to be the essential infrastructure company from the edge to the core, and the cloud.

Dell EMC Networking ensures modernization for today’s applications and the emerging cloud-native world.

Dell EMC is committed to disrupting the fundamental economics of the market with a clear 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.

At the physical layer of a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), the Layer 2 or Layer 3 transport services

provide the switching fabric. A leaf-spine architecture using Layer 3 IP supports a scalable data network. In a

Layer 3 network fabric, the physical network configuration terminates Layer 2 networks at the leaf switch pair

at the top of each rack. However, VxRail management and NSX Controller instances and other virtual

machines rely on VLAN-backed Layer 2 networks.

Discovery or virtual machine migration cannot be completed because the IP subnet is available only in the

rack where the virtual machine resides. To resolve this challenge, a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet

VPN (EVPN) is implemented. The implementation creates control plane backed tunnels between the separate

IP subnets creating Layer 2 networks that span multiple racks.

Layer 3 IP fabric

VXLAN overlay

VLAN

Spine 1

Z9264-ON

Spine 2

Z9264-ON

VxRail Node

Leaf 1A

S5248F-ON

Leaf 1B

S5248F-ON

Leaf 2A

S5248F-ON

Leaf 2B

S5248F-ON

Illustration of stretched layer 2 segments between VxRail nodes in separate racks

1.1 VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail

VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail, part of Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, provides the

simplest path to the hybrid cloud through a fully integrated hybrid cloud platform that leverages native VxRail

hardware and software capabilities and other VxRail unique integrations (such as vCenter plugins and Dell

EMC networking integration) to deliver a turnkey hybrid cloud user experience with full stack integration. Full

stack integration means that customers get both the HCI infrastructure layer and cloud software stack in one,

complete, automated lifecycle, turnkey experience. The platform delivers a set of software defined services

for compute (with vSphere and vCenter), storage (with vSAN), networking (with NSX), security, and cloud

management (with vRealize Suite) in both private or public environments making it the operational hub for

their hybrid cloud as shown in Figure 2.