Network plane

The Telco Blueprint networking environment includes the following switches:
  • Switches configured as part of the blueprint
    • Management switches (Out of Band Management - HPE FlexFabric 5900)

    • Data switches (Top of the Rack - HPE StoreFabric SN2100M or HPE FlexFabric 5950)
      NOTE:

      Data switches play the role of leaf switches in the Telco Blueprint network architecture.

  • Additional switch configurations that may be required on the following switches for Telco Blueprint connectivity
    • Customer infrastructure switch

    • Border Leaf switches (Customer end Virtual Tunnel End Point (VTEP))

    • Spine switches (non-VTEP)

    NOTE:

    These switch configurations are optional and depend on the data center setup.

Management switch

The management switch uses Out-of-Band Management which involves the use of dedicated channel for managing network devices.

Data switch
For the blueprints, the Data switch (HPE StoreFabric SN2100M or HPE FlexFabric 5950) is configured as the Top-of-Rack switch. Data switches support internal API, storage management, and tenant communications in NFVI. These switches are configured in High Availability (HA) mode.
IMPORTANT:

Each data switch provides five physical uplink ports per switch to the customer network. The maximum and minimum bandwidth per port are 100G and 10G respectively. The count of the uplink ports may vary with the type of data switch used.

Customer infrastructure switch

The customer infrastructure switch is positioned in the customer data center. The customer infrastructure switch must be configured with iLO-OOBM network (VLAN and IP interfaces) by the network administrator at the customer end to allow the HPE Management switch to communicate. For more information on how to configure the iLO-OOBM VLAN IP addresses, see Configuring iLO-OOBM VLAN in customer infrastructure switch.

Spine switch

Spine switches are non-VTEP switches that provide the connectivity between the Data and Border Leaf switches. Spine switches must be configured by the network administrator at the customer end.

Border Leaf switch

A Border Leaf switch is used for providing the north-south data traffic and connects to the WAN or outside of the fabric. Any leaf within the network follows the default route towards the Border Leaf for all external traffic (towards the Internet or a different device). A Border Leaf switch must be configured with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) instance by the network administrator at the customer end.

For more information on the sample Data switch configuration and Management switch configuration, see Sample Configuration for Mellanox SN2100 Switches and Configuring FlexFabric 5900 (Management) switch, respectively.

Uplink connectivity to the servers

HPE ProLiant DLs and HPE Edgeline
Each Data (ToR) switch provides:
  • 10 physical uplink ports per switch (data - HPE 5950) to the customer network.

  • Five physical uplink ports per switch (data - HPE SN2100M) to the customer network.

The maximum and minimum values per port are 100G and 10G, respectively.
HPE Synergy

Mellanox SH2200 Switch Module for HPE Synergy provides 25Gb and 50Gb Ethernet connectivity to the Synergy compute modules, and 40/100Gb Ethernet to the upstream network switches. From each frame, there are 6 uplinks from SH2200 module to ToR switch and 12 downlinks from SH2200 to the compute.

HPE F8 40Gbe Virtual Connect Switch Module for HPE Synergy provides, 40GB Ethernet connectivity to the data switch. From each F8 module, three uplinks are provided to the data switch which are used for management traffic and storage traffic.

For more information on manual configuration of the management and data switches, see Configuring switches.