Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

Custom option: Six ports

VxRail is most commonly deployed with two or four ports. For more network-intense workload requirements but if needed, VxRail can be deployed with six or eight network ports.

This option supports spreading the VxRail networking between NDC/OCP ports and PCIe ports, and between ports on two different PCIe adapter cards. In this topology, resource-intense workloads such as VMware vSAN and VMwarenvMotion can each have a dedicated Ethernet port instead of shared Ethernet ports. This prevents the possibility of saturation of shared Ethernet port resources.

The following figure shows VxRail nodes with four NDC/OCP ports, a pair of PCIe ports connected to a pair of ToR switches, and one optional connection to management switch for iDRAC:

With the six-port option, you can use more of the PCIe ports as opposed to the NDC/OCP ports. If the two PCIe slots occupied with network adapter cards, you can spread the VxRail networking workload across three network adapter cards.

The following figure shows VxRail nodes with two NDC/OCP ports and ports from a pair of PCIe adapter cards connected to a pair of ToR switches, and one optional connection to management switch for iDRAC: