Deployment Guide

9 VxFlex Network Deployment Guide using Dell EMC Networking 25GbE switches and OS9
3 Networking
In VxFlex, inter-node communication (for managing data locations, rebuilding, and rebalancing, and for
application access to stored data) can be done on one IP network or spread across separate IP networks.
Regardless of the model, VxFlex supports VLANs. Management is done in one of two ways:
• Via a separate network with access to the other VxFlex components
• On the same network
Each VxFlex Ready Node R730xd has four 25GbE ports provided by two Mellanox Connect X-4 LX PCIe
cards. Two of the available four ports are used to carry all traffic types (frontend and backend) in this
deployment and Quality of Service (QoS) is used to ensure that traffic requiring low-latency is prioritized (see
Section 7.2).
Note: Since a node running VxFlex can provide compute resources, the remaining two free ports can be
leveraged for compute workloads depending on requirements of the environment.
3.1 Network topology
This section provides an overview of the network topology and the physical connections used in this
deployment.
Production network
A non-blocking network design allows the use of all switch ports concurrently. Such a design is needed to
accommodate various traffic patterns in a VxFlex deployment and optimize the additional traffic generated in
the HCI environment. Figure 5 shows a leaf-spine topology providing access to the existing infrastructure
found in a typical data center. The VxFlex components, MDM, SDS, and SDC, reside on the VxFlex nodes
while ESXi is managed through vCenter in the management environment.