Saturday, August 31, 2013

DELL Force10 S6000 as a physical switch for VMware NSX

Based on this  document http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/nsx/vmw-nsx-dell-systems.pdf
DELL Force10 S6000 is going to be fully integrated with VMware NSX (NSX is software defined networking platform).

Dell Networking provides:
  • Data center switches for robust underlays for L2 overlays
  • CLI for virtual and physical networks
  • Network management and automation with Active Fabric Manager
  • S6000 Data Center Switch Gateway for physical workloads to connect to virtual networks
  • Complete end-to-end solutions that include server, storage, network, security, management and services with world wide support
Dell S6000 use cases:
  • Extend virtual networks to physical servers -  S6000 works as VXLAN gateway to VLANs on physical network (VXLAN VTEP).
  • Connect physical workloads reachable on a specific VLAN to logical networks via an L2 service
  • Connect physical workloads reachable on a specific port to logical networks via an L2 service
  • Connect to physical workloads in a Physical to virtual migration
  • Migration from existing virtualized environments to public clouds, creating hybrid clouds
  • Access physical router, firewall, load balancer, WAN optimization and other network resources

I cannot wait to test it in my lab or on customer PoC engagement. After hands-on experience I'll share it on this blog. 

2 comments:

Ash said...

Hi David,

Any luck with implementing this?

Ash

David Pasek said...

Unfortunately not. I have hands-on experience only with Force10 S60 and S4810 so far. Force10 S6000 is relatively expensive box so there are not too much customers having it. Especially in EMEA and in Czech Republic. I guess there are more S6000 customers in US. However, I hope I'll have opportunity to plan-design-implement it in the future.