Lenovo Flex System EN4023 Product Manual page 7

The VCS Virtual Fabric feature of Brocade VCS Fabric technology is designed to address the
scalability restrictions of traditional VLANs used for multi-tenant segmentation. It provides native
secure multi-tenant support for both physical and virtual application deployments within and
across VCS fabrics. Managed centrally through Brocade VCS Logical Chassis, the VCS Virtual
Fabric feature simplifies and accelerates application deployment, and it ensures policy consistency
for each tenant regardless of how application components are distributed across the data center.
VXLAN and VRF Lite are other options for network segmentation.
The EN4023 provides the ability to have highly elastic domains with extremely efficient load
balancing in Layers 1–3. Innovative Brocade ISL Trunking load balances traffic across all the links
in a trunk for improved performance at Layer 2. Also in Layer 2, Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) uses
all available network bandwidth, allowing all links to be fully active and utilized. In the event of a
failure, traffic is automatically routed to the closest path, providing higher resilience and greater
application uptime. In Layer 3, the fabric automatically load balances all flows among a number of
Layer 3 instances that collectively act as a single Layer 3 gateway. Multilayer multipathing helps
improve network utilization, reduce latency, and increase overall network performance.
Optimized for virtualization and Software Defined Data Centers:
Zero-touch VM discovery is provided with Brocade VM-Aware Network Automation which
eliminates the manual configuration of port profiles when a VM is added to the fabric or moved,
offering an additional level of automation. The VCS fabric directly communicates with VMware
vCenter, automatically downloading all port profile information and the associated MAC address,
and distributes the VM-specific information to all switches within the fabric. When the VM moves,
no additional configuration is required.
Automatic Migration of Port Profiles: During a VM migration, the destination network switch ports
must be configured to ensure that the VM traffic experiences consistent policies and
configurations. With the Brocade Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) feature, the VM
policies and networking policies follow the VM within the VCS fabric. As a VM migrates, the
destination port in the fabric learns of the MAC address move and automatically activates the port
profile configuration within a single fabric or across separate fabrics. AMPP is hypervisor-agnostic
and can be used with various hypervisors.
Brocade VCS Gateway for NSX is a solution that unifies both virtual and physical infrastructure for
a seamless transition to cloud environments. By unifying the best of both worlds — physical and
virtual — Brocade VCS Gateway for NSX allows physical devices to connect to virtual devices.
Brocade VCS Gateway is integrated with VMware NSX, enabling the entire VCS fabric to function
as a VXLAN gateway and eliminating the need for specific network placement. As such, the NSX
Controller sees the VCS fabric as a single logical gateway, thereby simplifying management and
providing resiliency. Administrators can leverage existing infrastructure while gaining the benefits of
VXLAN to support multi-tenancy and large-scale deployments of distributed applications.
Logical Chassis technology and northbound APIs with fabric- and node-level orchestration
capabilities provide operationally scalable management and integration with data center
orchestration frameworks such as OpenStack.
Brocade supports programmatic solutions and DevOps tools that allow a customized approach to
deploying, operating, and interacting with the network. These solutions offer a new level of
simplicity, agility, and rapid, automatic deployment, enabling data centers to evolve to meet new
technology requirements.
OpenStack Neutron ML2 support and fabric-level, programmable REST APIs with a YANG
data model to enable integration with third-party and in-house network automation and
cloud management tools. Support for Puppet and Python scripting offers choice and more
effective configuration management. These programmability options help automate,
simplify, reduce human error, and streamline the process while reducing costs. The tools
also help drive productivity by enabling rapid application deployment for enterprises, and
increase profitability by streamlining the tenant provisioning process and making networks
more intelligent and flexible for cloud providers.
VCS fabrics provide support for OpenFlow 1.3, an industry-standard SDN communications
protocol, allowing operators to address complex network behavior, optimize performance,
and leverage a richer set of capabilities.
Lenovo Flex System EN4023 10Gb Scalable Switch 7