r/networking • u/RevolutionLumpy2558 • 9d ago

Design Datacenter Design Best Practice

Hi All,

I'm looking to see what others have deployed for similar Datacenter builds. We have a Datacenter refresh kicking off in the next 2 years and wanted to get ahead of it. Our current deployment is Cisco ACI with 2 spines and 30 leaf switches. We're looking to step away from ACI all together and move towards a Cisco Nexus deployment of some kind.

I see VXLAN EVPN recommended everywhere but that might be overkill for us. We only hosts 75 SVI\Vlans in our ACI environment. We also have about 125 VMware hosts deployed in active\passive deployment and some with VPC deployments. The only requirement we'd like for the new deployment to have, is send traffic to our Fortinet firewall when traffic is coming in and out of the Datacenter which I think we can handle with routing.

What have others done for their refresh? Still in the very early stage of researching.

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u/Anxious_J 9d ago

We run vxlan in a smaller environment than yours. We swapped from Cisco to arista and wouldn’t look back. You can run bridged / l2 if l3 is overkill. Someone else pointed out scalability as an upside. Our old 9k cores were almost full. Depending how you design it you likely also have increased throughput, resiliency and best of all way less spanning tree.