802.1Qbb and 802.1Qaz

[swordfishBob]

Hi,

Do any MS switches support 802.1Qbb and 802.1Qaz ? Or are there plans to add this?

thanks.

[Brash]

I haven't seen any documentation suggesting that support is present or is planned.

I would say it doesn't align with Meraki's typical target market.

PFC is most commonly used for FCOE which you'll primarily find on datacenter switches rather than enterprise core and edge.

[swordfishBob]

Indeed, though MS is pushing Azure HCI as a branch-office convergence approach requiring just two physical servers and (ahem) PFC.

[Brash]

I haven't read up on the solution specifics but I'm guessing the PFC requirements is for East-West storage replication/communication between servers. You could use a datacenter switch that only handles this traffic while using Meraki for the host/VM network traffic.

Even if it were supported on an enterprise core or access switch, I'd probably avoid it anyway given the need for large buffers and very fast ASIC's. PFC on slow(er) switches or across multiple hops can cause huge performance issues that are just awful to troubleshoot.

[swordfishBob]

East-West can be done (for a small number of servers) with direct links, no switch. They seem to still require highly capable North-South switches. Perhaps for fast & robust failover of N-S traffic and bandwidth sharing?

Physical network requirements for Azure Stack HCI - Azure Stack HCI | Microsoft Docs

[Brash · Accepted solution]

North-South will definitely require solid switches given all of your Management, VM Network and vMotion traffic will be going through it but the requirements for those should be exactly the same as any other server solution (HCI, traditional SAN etc).

I can only see PFC being a requirement if you're using the same switches to push the storage traffic across, or presenting the storage directly to other hosts on the network. In that circumstance though, I'd probably just opt for physically separate switches.

That said, these are all assumptions.
The only HCI solution I've worked on (albeit very closely) is Cisco Hyperflex.

[Inderdeep]

@swordfishBob : I dont think so it is there and @Brash correctly said it is for DC switches !