This statement is especially true when it comes to naming objects inside of ACI. Naming your ACI objects in a meaningful and thoughtful way will increase the supportability of your fabric and even help the fabric to become “self-documenting”. Having naming conventions that are haphazard, will have an equally negative impact. To complicate matters, … More ACI Naming Convention Best Practices
The CIMC is Cisco’s answer to lights-out management for UCS servers, including the UCS servers that house the APICs. For troubleshooting the APIC, most engineers assume you must have direct console (i.e., physical access) or use the Java (or later HTTP)-based KVM Console to get true OOB access to your APIC, however, this is not … More Using Serial-over-Lan (SOL) on the CIMC to access the APIC (instead of KVM console)
I’d like to thank Soumitra Mukherji for his work on this post! As of this posting, January 2018, Multipod for ACI has taken off and seen a good amount of field exposure amongst Cisco ACI customers. There have been a number of customers who were going to deploy either dual ACI Fabrics or Stretched ACI … More Deploying a Tenant across two-sites using the Multi-Site Controller in 3 easy steps
Another great resource for targeted video help for ACI installations can be found on Cisco’s official ACI YouTube channel. Everything from a “What’s new” overview for various code releases to detailed overviews of how to use Postman with Multisite. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/c/CiscoACIchannel
Beginning with APIC code 1.1, Cisco introduced the ability to allow routes to “Transit” the fabric. Prior to this release, the ACI Fabric was only seen as a collection of “stub” networks, meaning that the ACI Fabric would only advertise Bridge Domain subnets; it would not advertise routes received from an external routing peer to … More Transit Routing Use case – EIGRP with routed interfaces
One of the main advantages that ACI offers is the ability to simplify the configuration, and the ability to backup, your entire datacenter configuration. In a traditional datacenter network, backups must occur on a box-by-box basis (leading to configuration sprawl), and the process to back them up is generally managed by a combination of network … More Creating a backup for your APIC Cluster
After a brief break from the APIC, the auto-provisioning feature is available (again) inside of the APIC GUI starting with APIC version 2.3 release and later. However, if you need it (or want it) and you are running at least APIC 2.2, you can configure the feature via API (i.e., XML or JSON). Why would … More Using the auto-provision feature to automatically upgrade new switches added to your ACI Fabric
Our friends over at Cisco TAC have put out a great video that talks about deploying Multi-site, from scratch! If you know you need an active-active DC strategy, and are considering Multi-site for ACI, this is a must watch video.
Our friends over at Lumos Consulting have done a great job creating a full series of ACI videos (along with other videos as well). This video series covers everything from, “What is ACI” all the way to VMM integration. This is a great way to get up to speed with ACI concepts and features from … More Lumos ACI YouTube Channel
For folks who are looking to enable ACI transit routing functionality, there a couple of CCO sites that are must reads. Don’t sign off on your L3out design with transit routing until you have read the documents below! Cisco ACI Best Practices Guide https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/ACI_Best_Practices/b_ACI_Best_Practices/b_ACI_Best_Practices_chapter_010010.html The ACI Best Practices Guide focuses on supported topologies, guidelines and … More Transit Routing with ACI – CCO