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Network fabric overview for multi-rack deployments of Azure Local

Applies to: Multi-rack deployments of Azure Local 2511 and later

This article describes the capabilities of the network fabric used for infrastructure management for multi-rack deployments of Azure Local. The article also covers the workload networking required for these deployments.

The network fabric instance is a single deployed physical network infrastructure - including racks, switches, terminal server connections, and cabling - that Azure represents and manages as a Network Fabric (NF) resource.

Benefits of network fabric

The network fabric enables you to:

  • Use a single pane of glass to manage your on-premises networking devices and their configuration.

  • Create infrastructure networks and workload networks that are isolated.

  • Configure route policies to import and export specific routes to and from your existing infrastructure network.

  • Monitor and audit network device performance, health, and configuration changes through metrics, logs, and alerts.

  • Set access policies to govern who can manage the network.

  • Manage the lifecycle of the network devices.

  • Get a highly available and robust control plane for your network infrastructure.

Diagram showing network fabric components.

Key capabilities of network fabric

Key capabilities offered in the network fabric are:

  • Bootstrapping and lifecycle management - Automated bootstrapping and provisioning of network fabric resources based on workload use cases. It provides various controls to manage network devices in enterprise environments through Azure APIs.

  • Workload network configuration - Automated network configuration in Network Fabric for workloads that are deployed on the compute servers. The network configuration enables east-west communication between workloads as well as north-south communication between external networks and workloads.

  • Observability - Monitor the health and performance of the network fabric in real time through metrics and logs.

  • Network policy automation - Automating the management of consistent network policies across the fabric to ensure security, performance, and access controls are enforced uniformly.

  • Networking features built for enterprise customers - Support for unique features like multicast, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), and jumbo frames.

Next steps

See Complete deployment prerequisites.