Aruba Data Center Professional case studies
Aruba Data Center Professional · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Aruba Data Center Professional credential is a vendor certification aimed at network engineers, data center architects, and implementation specialists who design, build, and operate Aruba CX-based data center fabrics. It sits above associate-level switching knowledge and assumes the candidate is comfortable with campus-scale routing and switching before walking into a spine-and-leaf world. The Aruba Data Center Professional case studies are 5 cases and about 4,094 words.
1Choosing an underlay and MTU plan for a 4-spine/12-leaf refresh
A retailer is refreshing a 2016-era pod with 4 Aruba CX 8360 spines and 12 CX 8325 leaves: 100G fabric links, 25G host ports, two racks per leaf pair, servers dual-homed with LACP. The team runs OSPF today, has no BGP production experience, and wants sub-second reconvergence plus a fabric that is fully reproducible from Ansible.
870 words, about 4 min2Asymmetric IRB and a stateful firewall that only sees half the flow
A financial-services tenant hosts 900 VMs across three VRFs (PROD, DEV, SHARED-SERVICES) on a two-spine, twelve-leaf EVPN fabric. Two hard requirements: (a) PROD must reach SHARED-SERVICES through a stateful firewall, while DEV must not; (b) east-west traffic between two VMs on the same leaf must never leave the leaf.
890 words, about 4 min3PCI segmentation where 30% of east-west traffic never reaches the ToR
A payments provider runs 600 VMs on 40 ESXi hosts across two VSX-attached racks. All VMs sit in one /16 VLAN.
806 words, about 4 min4Four-eyes change control and five-minute rollback for 240 switches
A managed-services provider operates 240 AOS-CX switches across six data centres, managed today by ad-hoc Ansible playbooks and a shared enable password kept in a wiki. Change control requires a second pair of eyes; the audit team wants proof that a bad change was rolled back within five minutes; and the last outage traced to a hand-edited VLAN change on one leaf that nobody replicated.
726 words, about 4 min51% packet loss on one flow after a VXLAN migration
Six weeks after migrating a two-spine, four-leaf VXLAN/EVPN fabric, a customer reports that a batch job between rack 1 and rack 3 fails about 1% of the time with connection resets, always during bulk transfer. Small API calls are fine and ping succeeds at default size.
802 words, about 4 min