Hi,
We've just got some Dell PowerEdge1000e blades in through the door, along with a few trays EqualLogic storage. At the back of the blades we've got M8024 10gig switches (4 switches, in two fabrics, two per fabric), and we've also got a couple of nexus nk5's to glue it all together.
We're not sure about the best toplogy to go for on this.
Initially we were going to fully mesh from the Dell switches to both nexus switches, but this is a nightmare for spanning-tree, as the Dell's only run basic STP or MST, and not anything that's compatible with PVST which we could run on the nexus's.
The EqualLogics are going straight into the Nexus's
We then thought about stacking the Dell's, but they're not stackable. We could just trunk between them, and then one pair of trunks from each switch fabric up to each Nexus to simplify spanning tree.
Sounds confusing? PDF attached with somewhat faint diagram
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated
Many thanks