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Review: Dell VxRail Solution - SmartFabric or No SmartFabric

Last Updated: 7/13/20

My company recently purchased a Dell VxRail 6 node cluster. After many meetings we elected to use Dell's HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) network solution called "Smart Fabric".  This was optional and not require, but was supposed to make things "easier" to manage. I regret the decision.

 

Hardware

Servers: E560d
Switches: S5248-ON running OS 10.5.0

 

Comments

  • OS 10 is better than OS 9, if using Dell switches always pick a model that supports OS 10. OS 10 is more Cisco like. (I still prefer Cisco)
  • Smart fabric is a name Dell uses within many of the product areas. They are not all the same. searching online to see what smart fabric features are or are not support may not be very useful. you may be reading about "smart fabric" but it might not be the one you are looking for.
  • Smart Fabric is NOT just a special VM with a web GUI that lets you configure multiple switches all in one step.
  • Smart Fabric (for VxRails) has no GUI for network engineers except for a small area in vCenter (OpenManage network integration) that has almost no configurable items.
  • Level 1 Dell support told me (in June 2020) that Smart Fabric has only been in use by VxRail for about 1 year. Not many support people know much about it until you get a higher level engineer.
  • We were told that buying "all" of the HCI features of VxRail would make management and upgrades easier. Even if you activate smart fabric mode, you still have to upgrade VxRails and then your Smart Fabric (probably from the CLI). They are not one thing.

 




Pros

  • Creating a VLAN in vCenter automatically creates it on your switch and applies it to all the necessary VMware host ports.
  • Not many technical decisions to make after choosing to go with Smart Fabric
  • The CLI is still accessible (but only for viewing, not changing anything)
  • Supports LACP for upstream uplink.

 

Cons

  • No Layer 3 (should be in a future release)
  • VxRail is an engineered solution. Nothing can use the switch except VxRail nodes. Period.  All those empty switch ports are decorations until you buy more VxRail nodes.
  • You can only have one uplink path: normally an LACP LAG. (I've found this to flexible if two uplinks are necessary and they essentially go to the same upstream device for failover)
  • You cannot change.... anything ever. Except adding or removing ports in your LACP uplink. Things you cannot change:
    • LACP mode: active/passive
    • LACP slow/fast heartbeat.
    • spanning tree settings. All of them.
    • All other settings that you can imagine.
  • Everytime another network vendor starts a sentence with "Can you configure your smart fabric to....." the answer will be NO. Nothing to configure.

 

Conclusion

Using Smart Fabric with VxRails might make sense if you get a ton of hardware and you don't want to have to think about the network layer much OR if you have a tiny amount of VxRail hardware and you don't know much about networking.  If you are a traditional network administrator/engineer at a medium sized company, and you like being able to leverage the full power of your switches and your network, then you might want to think twice before choosing Smart Fabric.





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