A vendor proposes InfiniBand as the only acceptable RDMA answer for the city's Ethernet AI POD. How should the DCAI-aligned municipal team respond for the Cisco Data Center path?

In the DCAI-aligned Cisco Data Center AI context for a municipal Ethernet AI POD, the blueprint RDMA path is RoCEv2 over the Ethernet fabric. The correct response to a vendor insisting InfiniBand is the only acceptable RDMA answer is to confirm RoCEv2 on the civic Ethernet POD and treat InfiniBand as out of scope for this Cisco DC AI deployment exam context. That keeps design decisions aligned with Nexus leaf-spine Ethernet, QoS, PFC, and ECN practices the city is actually operating. Confirming RoCEv2 over the Ethernet AI fabric as the blueprint RDMA path and treating InfiniBand as out of scope with default best-effort QoS and 1500-byte MTU gets the transport right but abandons the lossless Ethernet AI POD already in scope with a misconfigured fabric model. Confirming RoCEv2 over the Ethernet AI fabric as the blueprint RDMA path and treating InfiniBand as out of scope while retaining enterprise default Nexus queuing profiles gets the transport decision right but leaves the Cisco DC AI backend without the lossless queuing RoCEv2 requires. Confirming RoCEv2 over the Ethernet AI fabric as the blueprint RDMA path and treating InfiniBand as out of scope using VXLAN EVPN overlays with converged storage queues adds an overlay and converged storage queues that rejects the municipal Ethernet investment and is not the Cisco DC path under test. Exam caveat: real-world sites may run InfiniBand elsewhere, but exam and blueprint answers for this Ethernet AI POD still center on RoCEv2—do not equate "RDMA" with "must be InfiniBand." Operational check: document RoCEv2 as the approved RDMA transport on the city Ethernet AI POD, keep NIC and fabric configs aligned to that decision, and reject scope creep that replaces Cisco DC Ethernet controls with an out-of-scope fabric solely because a vendor prefers it.