This is first part of a series of posts highlighting the best practices for customers who desire highly resilient networks in Network Edge. This entry will focus on the foundational architecture of Plane A and Plane B in Network Edge and how these building blocks should be utilized for resiliency.
Dual Plane Architecture
Network Edge is built upon a standard data center redundancy architecture with multiple pods that have dedicated power supplies and a dedicated Top of Rack (ToR) switch.
The most important concept for understanding Network Edge resiliency: the device plane determines which Fabric switch is used for device connections. Future posts will dive much deeper in the various ways that Network Edge devices connect to other devices, Clouds and co-location.
Single Devices
Anti-Affinity Deployment Option
Resilient Device Options
Redundant Devices |
Clustered Devices |
|
Deployment |
Two devices, both Active, appearing as two devices in the Network Edge portal. Both devices have all interfaces forwarding |
Two devices, only one is ever Active. The Passive (non-Active) device data plane is not forwarding |
WAN Management |
Both devices get a unique L3 address that is active for WAN management |
Each node gets a unique L3 address for WAN management as well as a Cluster address that connects to the active node (either 0 or 1) |
Device Linking Groups |
None are created at device inception |
Two are created by default to share config synchronization and failover communication |
Fabric Virtual Connections |
Connections can be built to one or both devices |
Single connections are built to a special VNI that connects to the Active Cluster node only. Customer can create optional, additional secondary connection(s) |
Supports Geo-Redundancy ? |
Yes, Redundant devices can be deployed in different metros |
No, Clustered devices can only be deployed in the same metro |
Vendor Support |
All Vendors |
Fortinet, Juniper, NGINX and Palo Alto |
The next post will cover the best practices for creating resilient device connections with Device Link Groups and can be found here.
Great write up @MasonHarris! Thanks for sharing!
This is very helpful.
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