An attendee of my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course asked me what the best learning path might be for a total (data center) beginner that has to design and install a small leaf-and-spine fabric in a near future.

This blog post was written for ipSpace.net subscribers who want to get the most out of ipSpace.net content. If you’re only interested in free stuff, you might feel it’s a waste of your time. You’ve been warned ;)

If you need a baseline understanding of what data center fabrics should be, start with Requirements, Architectures and Technology Overview parts of Data Center Fabric Architectures webinar.

Continue with the basics of leaf-and-spine fabric design:

• Introduction and Physical fabric design;
• Layer-3 fabric with non-redundant and redundant server connectivity. These sections cover routing protocol selection, core addressing, and the basics of active/standby versus active/active server connectivity.
• Whatever other section from the webinar that meets your target design. Most of you might have to go through layer-2 fabrics and mixed layer-2+3 fabrics.

Go through the VXLAN basics: at least introduction to VXLAN, data plane and VXLAN-based transport fabrics from VXLAN Technical Deep Dive webinar.

If you plan to deploy EVPN, go through the whole EVPN Technical Deep Dive. No shortcuts here – it’s crucial you get it all.

Most customers prefer to buy the gear first and then start wondering how to use it, so you might already have the kit list. If you did it right (starting with requirements and then figuring out which vendor meets them) continue with vendor-specific parts of Data Center Fabric Architectures webinar.

Obviously I’d recommend you go for the Designing and Building Data Center Fabrics or Building Next-Generation Data Center online courses, but even without doing that you can use the recommended path from the data center fabrics online course as you get most of the materials with Standard ipSpace.net subscription.