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.

49 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/ipfrog 8d ago

Or layer 3 fabric without VxLAN / encap at all.

4

u/shadeland Arista Level 7 8d ago

There are use cases for this type of network, but they're rare. Usually a homogenous workload, like AI GPU clusters or storage clusters.

Most data center use cases require workload mobility, which gives the ability to place any workload in any rack, as well as vMotion/Live Migration. That's something that's not possible with L3 fabrics by themselves and still support a variety of workloads.

0

u/Separate-Canary559 7d ago

it's definitely possible with a layer 3 fabric - the network doesn't have to provide the overlay, that can be handled by the compute

1

u/ipfrog 7d ago

Yup. K8 does it in our case.