Essential data centre technologies

Description

This course provides a foundation in data centre
infrastructure technologies. It begins with a tour of
virtualisation and the impact of this on the network
before moving on to the spine and leaf design, how it
works and how to scale. Layer 2 technologies enabling
this architecture are studied in terms of the impact on
the data centre. The course then progresses onto how
Layer 3 technologies such as BGP, EVPN and VXLAN
are used in data centre networks. The course then
studies interconnecting data centres finishing with a
section on automation and orchestration of both
underlay and overlay networks.

What will you learn

Data centre infrastructure course details

Staff involved with Data centres.

Network fundamentals for engineers

2 days

What is Ethernet?
Data centres versus enterprise networks.
Servers, Blades, Racks,
Clusters,
Storage,
Virtual Machines, Hosts, guests,
containers, orchestration.
Virtual switches. Distributed switches.
Live migrations (e.g. vMotion). IP addressing and VM traffic.

Data centre network architecture

Spine leaf design.
North south traffic, East West traffic,
Scaling: Ports, bandwidth.
N+1 redundancy,
ratio East West optimisation,
oversubscription.
2 tier versus 3 tier Leaf/Spine.
Pods.
Underlay, Overlay

L2 technologies

STP vs link aggregation vs multi link aggregation.
LACP, LLDP, CDP.
Scalability.
VLANs and VLAN pruning.
L2 design recommendations.
Disabling STP on edge ports.

L3 technologies

Underlay, Overlay,
VXLAN, VTEP, VXLAN overlay forwarding,
EVPN,
IS-IS,
COOP,
MP BGP,
VRFs,
EBGP, IBGP, AS numbers, route reflectors.
Anycast gateways.
MTU considerations-for data and control planes.
BUM traffic.

Data centre interconnects

Pods, fabrics, multi pods, multi fabric, multi site.
VXLAN with BGP/EVPN Data center interconnect.
Cloud integration,
Inter Site Networks.

Automation

Automation and orchestration,
Zero touch provisioning,
Devops, Netops, telemetry
automated configuration for underlay and overlay, SDN.