Users Guide

Networking requirements

This section covers the networking requirements from both the Cloud Foundation software perspective and from a networking hardware

connectivity perspective. This section also briefly describes the configuration options for configuring networks on a Dell EMC PowerEdge

MX7000 chassis. The actual networking configuration procedures are described in the later sections.

Topics:

• VMware Cloud Foundation networking

• Network configuration options

• Networking and NSX-T

• Physical Hardware

• Virtual Network Interfaces

• Network connectivity

• VLAN and subnets for networking configuration

• MTU Settings

VMware Cloud Foundation networking

A successful VMware Cloud Foundation deployment relies heavily on networks that are constructed and allocated to Cloud Foundation.

The networks are used by Cloud Builder during the installation and configuration process and then used by Cloud Foundation to carry out

various activities. The different networks are allocated to specific purposes and have different requirements.

VMware Cloud Foundation requires six networks and at least one connection to a customer network (for external access to your Cloud

Foundation stack). In the following example, a private IP address range is used for all connectivity within the management stack. There is

also an IP network that connects back to an external network.

Each of these networks is propagated to the Cloud Foundation stack using tagged VLANs. Using tagged VLANs enables mapping of port

groups to VLANs allowing access to resources as needed. All these networks are routable to and from each other. The routing task is

executed at some layer above the access level switched fabric that is deployed here.

The networks required to deploy Cloud Foundation are listed in the following table:

Table 6. Networks required to deploy Cloud Foundation

Network Description

Management Dedicated to communication between all the deployed resources and services. When the SDDC

Manager Utility needs to communicate to any other service or resource, it uses the management

network.

vSAN Used to communicate and synchronize vSAN storage traffic across multiple hosts to ensure data

integrity and resiliency.

vMotion Used to quickly redistribute virtual machine state and or storage between hosts.

VXLAN VMware NSX uses VXLAN to extend NSX networking constructs from host to host.

Uplink 1 and Uplink 2 VMware Cloud Foundation uses these networks for northbound and southbound traffic when an NSX

Edge Gateway is deployed.

Network configuration options

There are two different approaches to configuring the network switches used in this deployment guide. The first approach is the manually

configured approach where a startup-configuration is built up by manually configuring the ports, VLANs, aggregations (physical and

virtual), assigning tagging rules, QoS, and other settings typical to this type of deployment.

The other approach is to use Dell EMC SmartFabric which uses a simplified, reusable approach to configure the switches on the

PowerEdge MX7000 chassis and assign those configurations to the compute resources in the chassis.

32 Networking requirements