Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

VxRail node discovery and the Ethernet switch

VxRail has two separate and distinct management networks. One management network extends externally to connect to IT administration and external data center services. The second management network is isolated and visible only to the VxRail nodes.

The network that is visible only to the VxRail nodes depends on IPv6 multicasting services that are configured on the adjacent ToR switches for node discovery purposes. One node is automatically designated as the primary node and acts as the source. The primary node listens for packets from the other nodes using multicast. A VLAN assignment on this network limits the multicast traffic to the interfaces connected to the internal management network.

Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) snooping and querier is designed to constrain flooding of multicast traffic by examining MLD messages and forwarding the traffic only to interested interfaces. Traffic on this node discovery network is constrained through the configuration of this VLAN on the ports supporting the VxRail cluster. This setting may provide incremental efficiency benefits, but does not negatively impact network efficiency.

If your data center networking policy restricts the IPV6 multicast protocol, IP addresses can be manually assigned to the VxRail nodes as an alternative to automatic discovery.