Wired Intelligent Edge

Hello,

  Seeking advice from the group as I am quite new to Aruba (but with extensive Data Center design with Cisco/Juniper/Arista). 

  The customer is refreshing the DCs, currently, they are using a collapsed core for both campus and DC. 

  The campus side is undergoing a refresh with several CX stacks for WiFi and Wired connectivity. Now I am working on displacing the 4 x core Cisco Nexus 5K. 

  There are 2 comms rooms with only several hundred metres apart so I won't consider them as cross-site.  Then I am thinking of proposing a collapsed spine/leaf EVPN-VXLAN design with 2 switches in each comms room.  Given the small scale, 2 x 48 ports as a collapsed spine/leaf would be good enough for each comms room.

  The question is, can I cross-connect the 4 switches and make them as spine/leaf as well as border leaf (connect external networks)?  

  If it does, can I leverage Aruba Central to manage this network?  And what role should I config the switch to? 

  Thanks in advance. 

Hello,

  Seeking advice from the group as I am quite new to Aruba (but with extensive Data Center design with Cisco/Juniper/Arista). 

  The customer is refreshing the DCs, currently, they are using a collapsed core for both campus and DC. 

  The campus side is undergoing a refresh with several CX stacks for WiFi and Wired connectivity. Now I am working on displacing the 4 x core Cisco Nexus 5K. 

  There are 2 comms rooms with only several hundred metres apart so I won't consider them as cross-site.  Then I am thinking of proposing a collapsed spine/leaf EVPN-VXLAN design with 2 switches in each comms room.  Given the small scale, 2 x 48 ports as a collapsed spine/leaf would be good enough for each comms room.

  The question is, can I cross-connect the 4 switches and make them as spine/leaf as well as border leaf (connect external networks)?  

  If it does, can I leverage Aruba Central to manage this network?  And what role should I config the switch to? 

  Thanks in advance. 

Hi, I would mirror the question about if this requires EVPN for only four switches. It might be that you are considering the four core switches as the spine and other CX switches out on the campus as the leaves?

This is what I run. An EVPN network spread over a campus that allows for macro level network segmentation. The spine switches are also borders (to connect to legacy core for example). I found the attached doc extremely helpful in my understanding of how Aruba does this.

I don't think the concepts are different to any other vendor. You could use your past experience to design what is right for the situation and have confidence the CX are capable of achieving it.

Regarding central, I haven't had enough confidence in it (or maybe just experience) to use it for complex designs. I would certainly recommend the learning path be on the CLI for the richer ability to run commands that aid understanding. It could be moved to central once you are past that stage. I just found that if you don't have a large scale of boxes to benefit from "configure once, push to many" that doing CLI commands in netedit etc doesn't hold as much value compared to if you had 1000 edge switches with similar config (where the benefit is obvious).

Hello,

  Seeking advice from the group as I am quite new to Aruba (but with extensive Data Center design with Cisco/Juniper/Arista). 

  The customer is refreshing the DCs, currently, they are using a collapsed core for both campus and DC. 

  The campus side is undergoing a refresh with several CX stacks for WiFi and Wired connectivity. Now I am working on displacing the 4 x core Cisco Nexus 5K. 

  There are 2 comms rooms with only several hundred metres apart so I won't consider them as cross-site.  Then I am thinking of proposing a collapsed spine/leaf EVPN-VXLAN design with 2 switches in each comms room.  Given the small scale, 2 x 48 ports as a collapsed spine/leaf would be good enough for each comms room.

  The question is, can I cross-connect the 4 switches and make them as spine/leaf as well as border leaf (connect external networks)?  

  If it does, can I leverage Aruba Central to manage this network?  And what role should I config the switch to? 

  Thanks in advance. 

This a grear presentation. Is it from some lecture or video? Is it available somewhere? 

Hi, I would mirror the question about if this requires EVPN for only four switches. It might be that you are considering the four core switches as the spine and other CX switches out on the campus as the leaves?

This is what I run. An EVPN network spread over a campus that allows for macro level network segmentation. The spine switches are also borders (to connect to legacy core for example). I found the attached doc extremely helpful in my understanding of how Aruba does this.

I don't think the concepts are different to any other vendor. You could use your past experience to design what is right for the situation and have confidence the CX are capable of achieving it.

Regarding central, I haven't had enough confidence in it (or maybe just experience) to use it for complex designs. I would certainly recommend the learning path be on the CLI for the richer ability to run commands that aid understanding. It could be moved to central once you are past that stage. I just found that if you don't have a large scale of boxes to benefit from "configure once, push to many" that doing CLI commands in netedit etc doesn't hold as much value compared to if you had 1000 edge switches with similar config (where the benefit is obvious).

Hello,

  Seeking advice from the group as I am quite new to Aruba (but with extensive Data Center design with Cisco/Juniper/Arista). 

  The customer is refreshing the DCs, currently, they are using a collapsed core for both campus and DC. 

  The campus side is undergoing a refresh with several CX stacks for WiFi and Wired connectivity. Now I am working on displacing the 4 x core Cisco Nexus 5K. 

  There are 2 comms rooms with only several hundred metres apart so I won't consider them as cross-site.  Then I am thinking of proposing a collapsed spine/leaf EVPN-VXLAN design with 2 switches in each comms room.  Given the small scale, 2 x 48 ports as a collapsed spine/leaf would be good enough for each comms room.

  The question is, can I cross-connect the 4 switches and make them as spine/leaf as well as border leaf (connect external networks)?  

  If it does, can I leverage Aruba Central to manage this network?  And what role should I config the switch to? 

  Thanks in advance. 

Hi, I would mirror the question about if this requires EVPN for only four switches. It might be that you are considering the four core switches as the spine and other CX switches out on the campus as the leaves?

This is what I run. An EVPN network spread over a campus that allows for macro level network segmentation. The spine switches are also borders (to connect to legacy core for example). I found the attached doc extremely helpful in my understanding of how Aruba does this.

I don't think the concepts are different to any other vendor. You could use your past experience to design what is right for the situation and have confidence the CX are capable of achieving it.

Regarding central, I haven't had enough confidence in it (or maybe just experience) to use it for complex designs. I would certainly recommend the learning path be on the CLI for the richer ability to run commands that aid understanding. It could be moved to central once you are past that stage. I just found that if you don't have a large scale of boxes to benefit from "configure once, push to many" that doing CLI commands in netedit etc doesn't hold as much value compared to if you had 1000 edge switches with similar config (where the benefit is obvious).

Hello,

  Seeking advice from the group as I am quite new to Aruba (but with extensive Data Center design with Cisco/Juniper/Arista). 

  The customer is refreshing the DCs, currently, they are using a collapsed core for both campus and DC. 

  The campus side is undergoing a refresh with several CX stacks for WiFi and Wired connectivity. Now I am working on displacing the 4 x core Cisco Nexus 5K. 

  There are 2 comms rooms with only several hundred metres apart so I won't consider them as cross-site.  Then I am thinking of proposing a collapsed spine/leaf EVPN-VXLAN design with 2 switches in each comms room.  Given the small scale, 2 x 48 ports as a collapsed spine/leaf would be good enough for each comms room.

  The question is, can I cross-connect the 4 switches and make them as spine/leaf as well as border leaf (connect external networks)?  

  If it does, can I leverage Aruba Central to manage this network?  And what role should I config the switch to? 

  Thanks in advance.