Spine Leaf Solution

[glenn@netravine.com]

We have a customer looking to not quite go the route of Nexus 9k yet and are looking for available switches that can accomplish spine/leaf solution.  Below are their requirements.  They currently have Nexus 6001 switches in the datacenter and we had looked into using those switches to re-architect into Spine Leaf, however these switches do not support VXLAN.  So we're looking for non-9k switches that would help us out.  

Has 8 server cabinets
Looking for 2 switches as spine
Needs 16 switches as leafs
1g and 10g mixed environment
firewalls/zones deployed
external/dmz/internal
most of traffic is east to west
a lot of traffic is being pushed to SQL database

spine/leaf needs 40G uplink
Leaf host ports will be mix of 1/10Gig (Can be Twinax)

Requires VXLAN support

[Hector Gustavo Serrano Gutierrez]

Hi glenn@netravine.com 

Have you considered the Cisco Nexus 5600 Switches (Table 10. Ordering Information) which can do VXLAN BGP EVPN to be your customer's Leaf Switches?

For Spines, you need Nexus devices which can do Layer 3 Routing (i.e. OSPF or ISIS) and PIM Multicast but since they usually act as BGP Route Reflectors, you also need them to support BGP address-family l2vpn evpn.

Also, see:

Cisco Programmable Fabric with VXLAN BGP EVPN Configuration Guide
Table 1. Hardware and Software Support for Cisco Programmable Fabric with VXLAN BGP EVPN

and

Cisco Nexus 5600 Series NX-OS Layer 2 Switching Configuration Guide, Release 7.x

Chapter: Configuring VXLANs

Regards.

[Hector Gustavo Serrano Gutierrez]

Also, you may find this interesting. It is another option to be considered.
https://blogs.cisco.com/partner/the-ultimate-flexibility-cisco-full-stack-subscription