About the Leaf-Spine Fabric

Aruba Fabric Composer now supports two types of fabrics;

  • Management Fabrics
  • Data Fabrics (previously called as Leaf-Spine Fabrics)

Management Fabrics provide L2 Spine-Leaf workflows with the Aruba 6300 switch family.

The Data Fabrics consists of the following:

  • Leaf switches: Each rack contains two leaf switches. These switches contain access ports that connect to servers, firewalls, load balancers, and edge routers within the rack. Each leaf switch has high-speed connections to the spine switches for the fabric. Pairs of leaf-switches are interconnected together using Aruba VSX technology with active LACP pairing to deliver superior server connection redundancy.
  • Spine switches: Each rack can connect to all spine switches and each fabric supports two-to-eight spine switches. The spine switches can be located inside or outside the racks. The spine switches connect the leaf and border leaf switches, forming the leaf-spine fabric. The spine layer is made up of switches that serve as the backbone of the network. The spine switches do not connect to each other: however each spine switch does connect to all leaf and border leaf switches within the fabric.
  • Border leaf switches: Border leaf switches provide Layer 2 or Layer 3 external connectivity to networks outside the fabric and outside the rack. Additionally, border leaf switches can connect to servers within the rack. Border leaf switches support routing protocols that exchange routes with external routers. These switches apply and enforce policies for traffic between internal and external endpoints.

The leaf-spine fabric uses dynamic Layer 3 routing protocols to determine the best path. This type of network supports data center architectures with a focus on East-West network traffic where data travels inside a data center.