Designing Leaf-and-Spine Fabric

We're starting the design part of the webinar with the simplest possible scenario – each leaf switch is a single IP subnet – and focus on routing protocol selection, route summarization, leaf-to-spine link aggregation, and core link addressing.

The second half of this section describes detailed guidelines on using BGP and OSPF as the underlay routing protocols in a leaf-and-spine fabric.

After establishing the baseline in the Layer-3 fabrics with non-redundant server connectivity section we'll add complexity at the fabric edge: redundantly connected servers.

Is it possible to build a pure layer-3 data center fabric that supports redundant server connectivity and IP address mobility? You'll find out in this section.

Another approach to building a pure layer-3 fabric is to extend the fabric routing protocol into the servers and announce servers' loopback IP addresses using BGP.

We're leaving the stable world of L3-only fabrics and entering the realm of large VLANs that most enterprise data centers have to deal with. We'll cover numerous design scenarios, from traditional bridging to routing on layer 2 and MAC-over-IP encapsulation.

Most data center fabrics have to combine elements of large VLANs and routing. In this section we'll explore the various combinations, from traditional routing on spine switches to anycast routing on leaf switches.

Do you need QoS in data center fabrics? How do you handle load balancing between elephant and mice flows? This section describes some of the answers.

In this assignment you'll design a layer-2 fabric required to support a traditional enterprise data center with VLAN-based virtual networks.

During the networking Q&A session we discussed interesting aspects of stretched leaf-and-spine fabrics, QoS in data center fabrics, and the concepts of pods and superspines.

In this section you'll learn how to build very large data center fabrics. The section covers:

• planning and design
• disaggregation of chassis switches into individual components
• challenges and limitations of modern data center switches
• pod architecture
• sample single-SKU designs

As you analyze the vendor solutions, it quickly becomes obvious that every single one of them uses one of few typical control/management plane architectures, from completely decentralized model (sometimes heavily automated) to centralized control- or even data plane.

This section describes most of the architectures you might encounter in real life and documents their benefits and drawbacks.

Buffering is a confusing and sometimes controversial topic when it comes to data center fabrics. In this short section JR Rivers discusses some of the related theory and practicalities as well as gives insight into tools that are available to networking specialists.

This section contains recordings of live Q&A and whiteboarding sessions from courses run in 2016 - 2018. In these sessions we covered a wide range of topics, from pods and superspines to RIFT, OpenFabric and Segment Routing.

This webinar will help you grasp the EVPN fundamentals, potential use cases, and its benefits and drawbacks. The deep dive part of the webinar discussed technical details that will enable you to deploy and troubleshoot EVPN in multi-vendor environments.

Access content

You'll find the information on switch models and vendor-specific software functionality you might need to complete the design assignment in the reference section of the previous module.

Access content

All webinars in this section are included with your online course. Some of them are part of the core course content, others are included as reference material.