Hey guys,
I'm working with a company who's doing a Data Center build-out. This is not a huge build out and I don't believe I really need a 2 tier design (access, core/aggregation). I'm looking for a 1 tier design. I say this because they only really have one rack of hosts - and we are not connected to a WAN or campus network - we are a dev shop (albeit a pretty damn big dev shop) who hosts internet sites and web applications to the public.
My network design relies heavily on VRF's. I treat every web application published to the internet as it's town "tenant" with one leaked route which is my managment network so I have any management servers ( continues deployment, monitoring, etc...) sitting in this subnet that is leaked. Each VRF has their own route to a virtual firewall context of their own and out to the internet.
Right now we are in a managed datacenter. I'm going to be building out their own switching environment utilizing the above design and moving away from the managed data center. That being said I need to pick the correct switches for this 1 tier design. I need a good amount of 10gbe port density (124 ports minimum). I was thinking about going with 4 5672UP or 4 C3064TQ-10GT - these will work as both my access and core (about 61 servers, one fiber uplink to my corporate network, and one fiber uplink to a firewall running multiple device contexts via multiple vlans)
That being said - With the use of VRFs, VLAN, and MP-BGP (used to leak my routes) what is the best redundancy topology for this design. If I was using catalyst 6500's I would do VSS and be done with it - but I don't believe vPC on the nexus switches traffic and is really more for a two tier model (vPC on two cores, aggregation/access switch connects up to both cores but it looks like one.) What I need to accomplish sounds to me that I'm going to be doing this the old fashion way , running a port channel between each switch, and hopefully using a non STP method to avoid loops.
Am I left with any other options?
