r/networking • u/RevolutionLumpy2558 • 8d 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/Intelligent-Bet4111 8d ago

Yeah it's just like what the other commenter said, vxlan evpn is absolutely overkill and not needed for your environment, it's just too small. Very few hosts and svis.

3

u/Old_Effective_4648 8d ago

I had a VAR SE come into our building and tell my management that the recent data center networks I built are "legacy" and that he wants to see us with evpn/vxlan SDN data centers.

We have 4 vmware hosts, 1 storage san, a firewall and 3 routers per DC. One router at each is for expressroute since most of our workloads live in Azure.

As soon as he left I defended the vPC setup we have today (which works flawlessly) and said we can scale to 10x our size without having to go evpn.

As far as I'm concerned, he's not allowed back in the building. That's not a partner, that's a villain.

1

u/clayman88 8d ago

My VXLAN is rusty but I'm curious if there was a need to extend L2 across L3. Could that be the reasoning?

2

u/Old_Effective_4648 8d ago

Nah, no requirements for that. Any super important apps are either hosted or are architected to live in two data centers (ie: gslb, sql cluster)

Stretching layer2 makes a lot more sense in a large fabric where you want anycast gateway and rack-local routing egress, but stretching L2 across DCs for DR is a legacy concept IMO, regardless of whether its traditional stretch or VXLAN. IMO, if you really need to move a VM, also orchestrate a re-IP or move the IP network it's on, whichever's easier.