The top question all new ACI customers have (or should have), is what are the configurations that should be enabled on my fabric from the beginning? With that in mind, we’re going use this post as a living document with configurations that are considered “Best Practice” to have enabled. We will keep this document updated … More ACI Best Practice Configurations
DISCLAIMER – This post is not meant to take the place of a software recommendation process. Customers should still perform their own due diligence before selecting a software version for their own ACI Fabric. This post is meant to summarize the available ACI Software features, by release, and be used as a quick reference guide. … More ACI / APIC Software Guidance
Recently I had the pleasure to work with the fine folks at the Cisco Proof of Concept labs in Research Triangle Park, NC. Because of the unique times we live in, this normally onsite event was constrained to a virtual event, where we set on WebEx meetings throughout the week and ran through various test … More CPOC Series: Exploring ACI
In this video we explore using Policy Based Redirects to identify either a subset or ALL traffic between EPGs and forcing that traffic to an external device, in our case, an ASA FW. In our case, our ACI Fabric is the L3GW for all traffic. With the PBR feature, we are going to use an … More CPOC Series: ACI Service Chaining using Policy Based Redirect (PBR) for east-to-west traffic through an ASA FW
In this video we do some testing to see what happens if and when we lose all APICs in a cluster. Does dataplane traffic stop? When do we lose the ability to make configuration changes? What happens when traffic comes back online? Click on the video and let’s answer these questions!
In this video we explore the design practices of attaching multiple EPGs to a BD. There are several use-cases for this, including but not limited to: Application-centric design Not having to re-address servers that you want to split up (i.e., separating web servers from app servers from db servers in the same subnet) Compliance (i.e., … More CPOC Series: Achieving Segmentation in ACI by Attaching multiple EPGs to one Bridge Domain
In this video we explore a very popular topic in Microsegmentation. To summarize, Microsegmentation inside of ACI is taking devices inside of an EPG, and placing them inside of their own “sub-EPG”. This new EPG behaves exactly like normal EPGs from a connectivity perspective; we still need contracts to talk to other EPGs (including our … More CPOC Series: ACI Segmentation Using Microsegmented EPGs (uSeg)
In this video, we take a look at Isolated EPGs. By default, endpoints within the same endpoint group are free to communicate with each. However, there are use-cases where you might want to group a common set of devices, allow them to communicate to an restricted set of services, but not allow them to communicate … More CPOC Series: Segmentation in ACI using Isolated EPGs
What do you think of when you hear active/active as a requirement for datacenter connectivity? If its not the first thing on your mind, it’s in the top-5, and I’m talking about the need to influence ingress routing (i.e., keeping traffic local to where you endpoints reside). Whenever we have an active/active routing design, routes … More CPOC Series: Using the Host-based routing feature in ACI to optimize ingress routing for MultiPod
Healthscores in ACI are a powerfully simple way to help us troubleshoot connectivity issues inside of the ACI Fabric. In this video, we’ll take down interfaces that are connected to our fabric, and use the Healthscore inside of our Tenant to troubleshoot the issue.