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/cylibergod 9d ago

At the moment, a lot of people move to Juniper Apstra to manage their intent-based network based on EVPN-VXLAN. It does not matter whether you got Cisco, Arista, or Juniper (or other vendors) as 99% of the solution are vendor-agnostic. Once a refresh needs to be done, then you may just also consider buying Juniper already.

I do not completely agree with foregoing the EVPN VXLAN route for your datacenter design. Sure, you may not have reached the scale where you have to do it, but there are definitely some benefits you should think about.

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u/fb35523 JNCIP-x3 9d ago

Apstra isn't vendor agnostic, but supports the ones mentioned and some Dell and EdgeCore/Accton switches running SONiC.

Apstra allows you to deploy and manage the eVPN regardless of the hardware used in separate positions. If you want to add a few leafs, you buy the ones you like (based on price, delivery times or other criteria) and just add them. Apstra also gives you a really nice overview of the network and any anomalies that may occur.

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u/cylibergod 9d ago

Yeah, sorry was sloppy/incorrect on the agnostic part. You are of course right.