Users Guide

16 Dell EMC PowerEdge MX SmartFabric Configuration Guide with Cisco ACI
There is no peer link that is used between the Cisco ACI leaf switches. While a typical production
environment has multiple Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers (APICs), for this example, a single APIC
(APIC-1) is used.
All Dell EMC PowerEdge R730xd rack servers and MX compute sleds in this example are running VMware
ESXi 6.7.0. To install ESXI on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, follow the instructions on Installation of VMware
ESXi on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.
VMs named “web,” “app,” and “db” on the ESXi hosts are running Ubuntu Linux guest operating systems. A
third R730xd server is added to assist with vCenter configuration and is accessible over the OOB
management network.
The Cisco ACI environment has three PowerEdge R730xd rack servers that are directly connected to the ACI
leafs. These rack servers are in a VMware vSphere cluster, with a vCenter VM named mgmtvc01 on the
R730xd-03 as shown in Figure 4.
Integrating PowerEdge MX into the Cisco ACI environment enables the MX compute sleds to join the existing
VMware vSphere cluster. This enables the hosts and VMs to communicate using the relevant networks.
The environment uses the six networks that are shown in Table 4.
Networks used
VLAN ID
VLAN name
Description
Network address
Gateway address
1611
ESXi_Mgmt
ESXi host in-band management
172.16.11.0/24
172.16.11.254
1612
vMotion
VM migration
172.16.12.0/24
172.16.12.254
1613
vSAN
Storage
172.16.13.0/24
172.16.13.254
1614
web
VM data network
172.16.14.0/24
172.16.14.254
1615
app
VM data network
172.16.15.0/24
172.16.15.254
1616
db
VM data network
172.16.16.0/24
172.16.16.254
Note: While the VMware vMotion and vSAN networks are configured in this example, their use is out of scope
for this guide.
VMs in the validated environment use the IP addresses shown in Table 5.
VM IP addresses
VM Name
VLAN name
IP address
mgmtvc01
ESXi_Mgmt
172.16.11.171
web01-web04
web
172.16.14.1-4
app01-app04
app
172.16.15.1-4
db01-db04
db
172.16.16.1-4