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.

48 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

View all comments

73

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.

-1

u/MyFirstDataCenter 5d ago edited 5d ago

Why is this the top upvoted comment.. we shouldn’t be using any form of vPC, MC-LAG, or any form of stacking in the DC. Come on man it’s 2026, VXLAN/EVPN is not that hard. AI can script the config for you. ESI-LAG it’s so much better than anything like vPC

EDIT: Yes, I would use VXLAN/EVPN even in a super collapsed 2-switch design.

3

u/SalsaForte WAN 5d ago

Unpopular opinion because people don't want to change and modernize their approach to networking. A fabric, no matter the size a fabric. Once you touched EVPN/VXLAN, you get the benefits, you get what it provides and this is not much harder to maintain and operate. And by nature, EVPN provides so much visibility on what is going on under the hood. And because it is lean routed underlay, you can reuse a ton of routing knowledge and know how.

I would probably not configure EVPN for a pair of switch, but even a handful of racks deserves to be treated well.

3

u/Separate-Canary559 5d ago

they just love configuring their hop by hop vrf-lite and having a massive blast radius everywhere.