Users Guide

30 Dell EMC PowerEdge MX SmartFabric Configuration and Troubleshooting Guide
4 Creating a SmartFabric
The general steps required to create a SmartFabric are:
1. Physically cable the MX chassis and upstream switches.
2. Define the VLANs.
3. Create the SmartFabric.
4. If needed, configure uplink port speed and breakout.
5. Create the Ethernet uplink.
6. Configure the upstream switch and connect uplink cables.
These steps make the following assumptions:
• All MX7000 chassis and management modules are cabled correctly and in a Multi-Chassis
Management group.
• The VLTi cables between switches have been connected.
• Open Manage Enterprise - Modular is at version 1.10.00 and OS10 is version 10.5.0.1
Note: All server, network, and chassis hardware has been updated to the latest firmware. See Appendix D for the
minimum recommended firmware versions.
4.1 Physically cable MX chassis and upstream switches
The first step in creating the SmartFabric is to cable the MX chassis and upstream switches.
• For Management Module cabling, see Dell EMC PowerEdge MX Networking Architecture Guide.
• For VLTi cabling of different IOM placements, see Figure 8, Figure 9, and Figure 10.
For information on cabling the MX chassis to the upstream switches, see the example topologies in Section
10 in this document.
For further information on cabling PowerEdge MX in general, see Dell EMC PowerEdge MX Networking
Architecture Guide.
4.2 Define VLANs
Before creating the SmartFabric, the initial set of VLANs should be created. The first VLAN to be created
should be the default, or native VLAN, typically VLAN 1. The default VLAN must be created for any untagged
traffic to cross the fabric.
Note: VLAN1 will be created as a Default VLAN when the first fabric is created.
To define VLANs using the OME-M console, perform the following steps:
1. Open the OME-M console.
2. From the navigation menu, click Configuration > Networks.
3. In the Network pane, click Define.
4. In the Define Network window, complete the following:
• Enter a name for the VLAN in the Name box. In this example, VLAN0010 was used.
• Optionally, enter a description in the Description box. In this example, the description was
entered as “Company A General Purpose”.