Monday, June 10, 2019

Inter-connect two Dell VLT-enabled switch stacks

I'm a noob at networking but I find myself in the unfortunate (although exciting) position of designing a little L2 network between two buildings. Please refer to this picture for the logic schema of the infrastructure.

You should know this is a customer's site and I was i no way involved in the buying, designing, or cable pulling phases of this project.

In each room there are a couple of Dell Force10 S-series 10G switch, this switch will be used as ToR switches for an HPC cluster.

Given there are two switches, I thought of configure them in a resilient way, so that if one of them fails the network is still working.

I've read about VLT and I thought of using that as I (if I understand correctly) will still be able to configure the switches in an individual manner (say one host has only one cable connected, I don't need to worry about having a non-symmetric configuration).

The two buildings are already connected by the ISP devices (a Cisco 4351, a Cisco Catalyst 3650 48x1G BASE-T + 4x1G SFP and a Fortigate 100E, of each there is one in every building) which are themself connected through a LR SM optic cable, but since everyone of the ISP devices is gigabit, I wanted to use another optic cables (6 are available) to connect directly to the 10G switches.

What I want to know is: given the VLT configuration, how should I connect the switches? should I set up a LAG (or LACP) bond between the two of them or is there something I'm missing?



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