SDA Border switches with L2 Trunk

[dm2020]

Hey All,

Quick question. We have a pair of Cat 9500 border switches that are connected together at layer 3 to support an SDA fabric. We are looking to connect an ESXI host to the border switches using 2 x nics (dual homed) and determined that the border switches will need to be connected at L2 to support this correctly. Does anyone know if this is supported? 

Thanks

[jedolphi]

Hello,

Q1. Do you want port-channel from the ESXi server to both border switches? If yes then it requires the borders to be in a StackWise virtual pair, and right now StackWise virtual border is not supported

Q2. Will this ESXi server be talking to endpoints in more than one SDA VN? If yes then you will need route leaking. Route leaking on border is not supported right now. That needs to happen on fusion device

Generally speaking we encourage the attachment of servers at the fusion or behind the fusion, not on the borders directly.

Jerome

[dm2020]

Hey Jerome,

Thank you for the response. To answer your questions:

1. The server will be connected to each border using active/active nics (not in port-channel) with VMs in a given VLAN being shared across both links, hence the requirement for L2 connectivity between the borders.

2. Yes, the VMs will need to communicate with more than one SDA VN so we will be looking to configure the route leaking on a fusion router. The reason that we want to connect the EXSi servers to the border is because they have plenty of 10Gb SPF+ ports, whereas our fusion devices do not.

Thank you.

[jedolphi · Accepted solution]

No problems :) Route leaking on border not supported right now unfortunately. It will come in future via some new features. For now, if you need multiple VNs to connect to this server then you need to connect the server to fusion or something behind fusion. Please do not connect to border.

Best regards, Jerome

[dm2020]

Perfect, thank you.