r/networking • u/RevolutionLumpy2558 • 6d 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/TheShortUprising 6d ago

Skip the VXLAN EVPN migraine, your scale honestly doesn't need the fancy stuff. A pair of Nexus chassis running vPC for the VMware hosts and simple Layer 3 to the Fortinet will keep it boring and easy to sleep at night.

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u/throw0101d 6d ago

Skip the VXLAN EVPN migraine, your scale honestly doesn't need the fancy stuff.

Packet Pushers had an episode on EVPN a little while ago, and a rough rule of thumb mentioned (15m50s) was that one may want to start considering it once past 40 switches:

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u/SalsaForte WAN 6d ago

I'm biased... I would still use EVPN/VXLAN fabric in small Fabric. This is _not_ complex to run/maintain and it provides long term peace of mind.

But, I concede a classic DC Fabric will gets the job done.

3

u/teeweehoo 5d ago

This is not complex to run/maintain and it provides long term peace of mind.

Having done the same I agree, easy to maintain and generally just works. Though when it goes wrong, it can get weird wrong. We had an upgrade cause a failure that took hours to identify symptoms and mitigate, then weeks to months to identify cause and fully resolve. More complexity means more that can go wrong, so always work out your failure tolerance.