Gathering Useful Information For A Layer 2 Vlt Fabric; Selecting A Layer 2 Vlt Fabric Design - Dell Active Fabric Manager Deployment Manual

• Fabric interlink bandwidth (the links between the spines and leaves).
• Downlinks, 1 Gb or 10 Gb.
• The fabric interlink bandwidth, 10 Gb or 40 Gb, is fixed and based on the fabric type.
CAUTION: If you do not specify additional links in the fabric design for future expansion in the Port Specification
screen:
• Any future expansion requires rewiring the hardware.
• IP addresses are not reserved.
• You might have to bring down current switches to expand the fabric. For information on how to expand a fabric,
see Editing and Expanding an Existing Fabric

Gathering Useful Information for a Layer 2 VLT Fabric

To gather useful information for a layer 2 VLT fabric before you begin:
• Obtain the .csv file that contains the system MAC addresses, service tag and serial numbers for each switch
provided from Dell manufacturing or manually enter this information.
• Obtain the location of the switches, including the rack and row number from your network administrator or
network operator.
• Obtain the remote Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) / File Transfer Protocol (FTP) address from your network
administrator or network operator.
• Download the software image for each type of switch in the fabric: S4810, S4820T, S55, S60, Z9000, or MXL
blades. Each type of switch must use the same version of the software image within the fabric. Place the
software images on the TFTP/FTP site so that the switches can install the appropriate FTOS software image and
configuration file. The AFM automatically copies the minimum configuration into the specified TFTP/FTP
location. To specify a TFTP/FTP site, go to Administration > Settings screen. For information about which
software packages to use, see the Release Notes.
• Obtain the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server address to use for the fabric from your DHCP
network administrator or network operator. If a remote DHCP server is not available, AFM also provides a local
DHCP. The DHCP server must be in the same subnet where the switches are located. After you power cycle the
switches, the switches communicate with the DHCP server to obtain a management IP Address based on the
system MAC Address. The DHCP server contains information about where to load the correct software image
configuration file for each type of switch from the TFTP/FTP site during BMP. For information about BMP, see
Pre-Deployment – Step 7: DHCP
• Obtain the pool of IP addresses for the management port for each switch in the fabric.
• Obtain IP addresses (2-8 addresses, must be an even number) for the uplink configuration from the ISP service.
• Obtain IP addresses for the downlink configuration for connecting to the server or ToR.
• Gather protocol configuration for uplinks and downlinks.

Selecting a Layer 2 VLT Fabric Design

For workload migration over virtualized environments, use a Layer 2 VLT fabric design.
The AFM supports the following Layer 2 VLT fabric designs:
• Type 1: 1 Gb Top of Rack Deployment
30
Design.
Integration.