Originally I was going to create a detailed configuration guide for Multi-Pod, however, after checking out the the Cisco ACI MultiPod Configuration Whitepaper on CCO I realized I would be duplicating efforts at best. The configuration whitepaper on CCO contains detailed configuration examples for the IPN and screenshots from the APIC. If you are looking to deploy Multi-Pod, this is what you will want to use!
Why Multi-Pod?
Before we dig in, let’s examine some of the benefits that come with deploying ACI Multi-Pod.
- ACI Multi-Pod allows for fault isolation of Control Plane Protocols inside of each respective Pod (IS-IS and COOP protocols operate intra-Pod). This is important because it ensures that a routing or protocol issue in one Pod will not take down the entire fabric.
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Centralized Management through one APIC Cluster (Cluster of 3, 5, of 7).
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Eliminates fate sharing if one DC goes down
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End-to-end Policy Enforcement
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Pervasive GW across all leafs in all Pods
Hardware and Software Requirements
APIC Software Requirement
- 2.0(1) on APIC
- 12.0(1) on Leafs and Spines
- Ability to change MTU for Inter-Pod traffic (CPU generated traffic) – available starting with 2.2(2e)
- 50msec latency across Pods – Supported starting 2.3(1)
APIC Hardware Requirement
- Any APIC Model
- All Nexus 9000 Platforms for Fabric nodes
IPN node options
While the list below is not all inclusive, it gives a quick reference of platforms that can act as Inter-Pod Node devices.
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Nexus 9200, 9300-EX or later (not first generation 9300/9500).
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Nexus 7000
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ASR9k
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ASR1k
Regardless of which you choose, the IPN device must support the following:
- OSPF
- PIM Bi-Dir (will handle Unknown unicast, multicast and broadcast traffic)
- Jumbo MTU (will allow for VXLAN encapsulated traffic between Pods)
- DHCP Relay (will allow for Spine and Leaf nodes to be discovered across the IPN)
- QOS (will support the prioritization of APIC-to-APIC communication over the IPN)
- Support for 40/100G interfaces (or 10Gig with QSA adapters on the Spine)
Multi-Pod Scalability numbers
- 2.2(x) – 10 pods / 200 leafs per pod /No more than 400 leafs per fabric
- 3.2(x) – 12 pods / 200 leafs per pod / No more than 400 leafs per fabric
- 4.2(x) – 12 pods / 400 leafs per pod / No more than 500 leafs per site
Multi-Site vs Multi-Pod from an Availability Zone / Region perspective
First – some definitions (courtesy of AWS). If you’d like to know more about AZs/Regions on AWS, check out this link.
Regions – Geographically separated areas, each of which can be comprised of multiple availability zones.
Availability Zones – Locations within a Region that are designed to be isolated fault domains which provide low latency network connectivity to other Availability zones in the same Region.
* Note – What you read below is not mandate for every use-case of a Multi-Pod or Multi-Site design, rather it is a guideline that you can use when deciding which is more appropriate for your overall design.
When it comes to mapping the Availability Zone / Region concepts to ACI designs, here are some thoughts:
- Each “Fabric”, which is made up of multiple Pods, is considered a Single Availability Zone.
- Configuration Zones (an ACI concept) can be used to span certain switches in your fabric, and can be used to map the configuration zone to an availability zone (applies to configuration and policy only).
- “Multiple Fabrics (whether a single Pod or Multi-Pod) connected by Multi-Site” is considered a Region with multiple Availability Zones.
- The original use case for Multi-Pod is to have multiple “pods” of ACI at a customer location, linked together via Multi-Pod (i.e., AZ in one Region)
- Multi-Site allows you to manage and connect multiple sites (Several Fabrics) via the Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO)*
* NOTE – The ability to connect Multi-Pod Fabrics with Multi-Site became available beginning with APIC 3.2 code.
Multi-Pod vs Multi-Site at a glance
Guidelines and Limitations
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Spine switches must have an active Leaf facing link (LLDP up), otherwise it is deemed unused and cannot be used cannot be used by the fabric.
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LLDP must be enabled on the IPN switch
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At least one Spine must be configured with BGP-EVPN session for peering with remote Pod(s). For Production environments, you should have redundant connections.
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Up to 50msec RTT between Pod(s) is supported (this support was added beginning with the 2.3 software release).
Caveats
- Traffic loss for Multi-Pod traffic after a Spine reboot (CSCvd75131)
- In a Multi-Pod setup when a Spine switch is rebooted, traffic should not flow through the switch for 10 minutes after its routing protocol adjacencies come up. This is achieved by advertising a high metric into OSPF and IS-IS for 10 minutes. This works fine for OSPF, but not for IS-IS. The problem is that within the Cisco APIC, the default metric for routes redistributed into IS-IS (such as the remote POD TEP pool) is 63. This also happens to be the max-metric that can be set for redistributed routes into IS-IS in Cisco APIC. So when the spine that was just rebooted comes back up, it cannot advertise a worse metric than the default, which causes all of the leaf switches immediately to install the switch as an ECMP path for the route even though things such as COOP might not have converged yet. If traffic is hashed to this ECMP path, there could be traffic loss for several seconds.
- This issue can be seen in any Multi-Pod environment. Beginning with APIC 3.0 code, users have a way to change the default IS-IS metric to prevent this issue.
- To change the default ISIS metric for redistributed routes, go to Fabric > Fabric Policies > Pod Policies > ISIS Policy default, and change the value from 63 to 32.
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Fabric > Fabric Policies > Pod Policies > ISIS Policy default
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Spines dropping COS6 Inter-Pod traffic (CSCva15076)
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ACI Spines will drop Inter-Pod traffic (traffic coming across the IPN) when it is marked CS6, except iTraceroute. The bigger problem with this is that several Cisco platforms (Nexus 7000) will send control plane protocol traffic (i.e. STP, BGP, OSPF, etc.) marked as CS6 (CoS 6), and this cannot be changed on those platforms.
- If this traffic is dropped, it can result in the drop of BUM traffic between ACI Pods.
- As a workaround, change the QOS settings and re-mark COS6 traffic to COS4. If you need a detailed configuration guide to walk you through setting up QOS for Multi-Pod, check out the ACI Multi-Pod QOS guide.
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Design Considerations
Design Considerations for APICs
When it comes to deploying APICs in an ACI Multi-Pod Design, there are several ways to spread out your APICs across the various Pods, depending on how many Pods you intend to connect together. Cisco has a lot of good information to consider located on their Multi-Pod Whitepaper on CCO.
If you are just going with (2) Pods, which is very prevalent in DR/BC deployments, my rule of thumb is (2) APICs in Pod1, (1) APIC in Pod2, and a Standby APIC in both Pod1/2. My main reason for this is that you will alway have a full copy of the APIC Shards in both Pods.
- You always are assured that your APIC Shards are replicated between APIC1/2/3. This means if Pod1 goes down, you will have a full replica available on APIC3 in Pod2.
- If Pod1 were to go down, you can promote the Standby APIC in Pod2 to active and be ready to resume configuration (if needed).
Design Considerations with Firewalls
Active/Active Firewalls
As of APIC 3.2(4d), you can use an active/active firewall cluster that is stretched across pods. When deploying Cisco ASA or Cisco Firepower firewall appliances, this deployment model takes the name of “split spanned EtherChannel” and ensures that all the nodes of the cluster “own” the same MAC/IP values so that the stretched firewall cluster appears as a single logical entity to the ACI Multi-Pod fabric. This deployment model removes any concern about the possible creation of asymmetric traffic paths for both east-west and north-south traffic flows, as traffic will be dynamically redirected to the specific firewall node owning the connection state for that specific traffic flow.
Active/Standby Firewalls
Option 1 – Active/Standby FW with NO use of vPC
- Active and Standby FWs are connected to a single Leaf node with a physical link or a local port-channel.
- The “bounce” of traffic between BorderLeaf in Pod2 and BorderLeaf in Pod1 will work.
- This is supported in the 2.1 release starting with 2.1(2e) and in the 2.2 release starting with 2.2(2e) on ACI Leaf nodes (E, EX, FX)
Option 2 – Active/Standby FW with vPC
- Active and Standby FWs can be connected to respective Leaf pairs in each Pod.
- This is supported in the 2.3 release starting with 2.3(1) on EX/FX Leaf switches ONLY. This option is not supported on first generation ACI Leaf switches due to CSCux29124.