Terraform with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator for building Hybrid Cloud and end to end services

Table of contents Introduction What We Will Demo in this Article A Brief Introduction to Terraform Characteristics of Terraform Important Pointers of Terraform Terraform Providers Terraform HCL code structure What Order are Resources built Terraform Backends Provisioners Executing The HCL Code Types of IAC Tools Terraform Commands Items to Remember for Terraform Security Considerations when … More Terraform with Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator for building Hybrid Cloud and end to end services

Cisco ACI APIC and cAPIC monitoring using Prometheus/Grafana

Changes: 1/14/2022: Replaced all occurances of APIC 5.3 to 5.2.3 From Release 5.2.3 of APIC and release 25.x of cAPIC  Promethus Node Exporter Feature is available.   This allows you to monitor statistics from Prometheus and view pre-configured dashboards from Grafana to get quick status of APICs/cAPICs. In this write up,  I will show you how … More Cisco ACI APIC and cAPIC monitoring using Prometheus/Grafana

Cloud ACI 5.2: AWS Enhancements in TGW with TGW Connect Attachments

Cloud ACI 5.2 for AWS can now use TGW Connect Attachment to enhance the previous ACI/AWS integration.  You can read more about what we had pre cAPIC 5.2 by using only TGW VPC attachment at a previous writeup. Before we start discussing and showing how TGW Connect Attachment benefits this integration, let’s quickly discuss what … More Cloud ACI 5.2: AWS Enhancements in TGW with TGW Connect Attachments

Cloud ACI 5.2: ACI/Azure Tenant vNET Peering across Azure Acitive Directories

From Cloud APIC 5.2 you can configure Tenant vNET peerings across Azure Active Directories. This will be very useful for B2B connectivity. Prior to this tenant vNET peerings for Azure using cAPIC was only possible across subscriptions in the same Azure Active Directory. To Follow along this Proof Of Concept Lab in your own Azure … More Cloud ACI 5.2: ACI/Azure Tenant vNET Peering across Azure Acitive Directories

Cloud ACI 5.2: Azure Brownfield Integration with ACI Fabric

If you already have resources deployed in Azure, you can now connect your brownfield vNETS to the Azure cAPIC vNETs using vNET Peering.  This means your connectivity from ACI Fabric vNETS to the brownfield vNETS can go over Azure’s backbone directly.  Security Policies can be attached for this connectivity based on requirements. You can follow … More Cloud ACI 5.2: Azure Brownfield Integration with ACI Fabric

Cloud ACI 5.2: Interconnecting ACI Fabrics Over Cloud Provider’s Backbone at High Speed for both AWS and Azure

If you have 2 or more Cloud Fabrics in the same Cloud Provider you can now (from cAPIC 5.2) use the Cloud Providers backbone for interconnecting these Data Centers (DCI). Prior to this you needed to build IPSec tunnels over the Internet between the sites to achieve this. This gives you the benefit of high … More Cloud ACI 5.2: Interconnecting ACI Fabrics Over Cloud Provider’s Backbone at High Speed for both AWS and Azure

Cloud ACI 5.2: A compelling case for Cisco ACI Hybrid/Multicloud Data Centers

With the Covid pandemic, many enterprises have come to the realization that having a huge infrastructure for your Data Center on-Premise may not be the most cost effective.  A Hybrid Cloud Data Center (onPrem + cloud), or MultiCloud ( multiple Interconnected DC Fabrics in one or more cloud provider) Data Center may make more sense.  … More Cloud ACI 5.2: A compelling case for Cisco ACI Hybrid/Multicloud Data Centers

Subscribing Nexus Dashboard Insights Kafka Producer to a Kafka topic and streaming events to a Kafka Consumer

Applications frequently need to talk to other applications.  As an example Application A gathers some data and Application B needs to do some custom processing with the output of data from Application A.  When Applications that are split in functionality need to exchange data between each other, there are generally 2 kinds of ways to … More Subscribing Nexus Dashboard Insights Kafka Producer to a Kafka topic and streaming events to a Kafka Consumer

Jenkins /Ansible for ACI Orchestration and for Automated Configuration Sanity Check / Pre-verification with NAE/ND and Git integration

Jenkins is an open-source Continuous Integration server written in Java.  With Jenkins you can send configurations to devices using Ansible/Terraform/Bash/Shell/SSH and a variety of other methods / scripts to any device.  Jenkins is very commonly used by developers for creating/testing/deploying code and is an integral part of Infrastructure As A Code.  Jenkins can also orchestrate … More Jenkins /Ansible for ACI Orchestration and for Automated Configuration Sanity Check / Pre-verification with NAE/ND and Git integration

Cisco MultiSite Orchestrator on Cisco Nexus Dashboard

Changes: 11/30/2021 with updated information on Ansible and Terraform In a previous article,  I had introduced and guided on how to install Cisco Nexus Dashboard.  In this post I will discuss and do a short guidance on installing Cisco MSO on Cisco ND. Installation is really simple as you will see in a bit.  It’s … More Cisco MultiSite Orchestrator on Cisco Nexus Dashboard