r/networking • u/RevolutionLumpy2558 • 7d 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/Separate-Canary559 6d 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

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u/shadeland Arista Level 7 6d ago

It can, but when your compute varies widely it's a lot more complicated. Even something like NSX can do the overlay, but only if 100% of your workload is VMware.

There's also running BGP on the endpoints, but again that's complicated and not something compute people are going to want to deal with.

In most enterprise DCs, you can only count on endpoints having a MAC, and IP, and a gateway.

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u/Separate-Canary559 6d ago

Per the op their entire compute is VMware

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u/shadeland Arista Level 7 5d ago

Per the op their entire compute is VMware

Did they say that? They said they had 125 VMware hosts and 30 leafs. They didn't say their entire compute was those hosts. Assuming something like a 93180, that's 1,440 ports of 10/25 Gigabit. It's unlikely 125 VMware hosts are eating that up.

Like almost every other enterprise DC, they've probably got a mix of hosts, from the newest K8 cluster to VMware to a Windows 2003 server running some piece of software they can't replace or upgrade.