I’d like to thank Takuya Kishida for his work on this post! Common Pervasive Gateway is an older feature that was used to connect multiple ACI fabrics together via a L2 connection prior to the availability of ACI MultiPod and ACI MultiSite. While most customers will use a newer feature such as ACI MultiPod, or … More ACI Common Pervasive Gateway
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
There are certain times when CIMC access to your APIC is absolutely critical, for example, when you are troubleshooting a problem, upgrading your APICs, or performing a factory reset. During these times, you can access your APIC via CIMC by using the KVM console, which requires Java (or HTTP with CIMC 3.0), or by enabling … More Upgrading the CIMC for your APICs
For those of us with more than one ACI Fabric, how many times have you mistakenly logged into the wrong fabric and almost made a change that was intended for a different ACI Fabric? It’s easy to do! This problem can go downhill fast when you are just trying to test something in your lab, … More Configuring an APIC Banner (GUI Alias)
Did you know that you can enable logging for permitted and denied traffic that flows through your ACI Fabric? While this feature is not meant as a replacement for Tetration or Netflow, this can be a great tool for troubleshooting and examining traffic that is flowing through applications that reside in your ACI Fabric. In … More Logging ACL/Contract Permits and Denies with ACI
ACI contains a plethora of information. Using SYSLOG to get that information from all of the devices in your fabric to a centralized SYSLOG server is still a good way of aggregating logging data, alerts, and audit information. In this post, we’ll review what data is available to be forwarded to your external SYSLOG server, … More Configuring Syslog for ACI
One of the most frequent topics that comes up when I am discussing ACI with customers, is, “How can we better operationalize ACI?”. In other words, how can we take what we have with ACI, and make it simpler to consume for not only ourselves, but for our Ops staff? Operationalizing and maintaining contracts between … More Operationalizing ACI: Contracts Viewer
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 … More ACI Multi-Pod Caveats and Considerations
I’d like to thank Soumitra Mukherji for his work on this post! When configuring MultiPod, a frequently asked question that often comes up is how to configure QOS between the ACI Fabric and the IPN network, to ensure that critical ACI fabric traffic is not dropped. With this article, we will go through configuration examples of … More ACI Multi-Pod QOS
Upgrading your ACI Fabric is one of the main selling points for ACI. However, making the decision of where to upgrade to can be a tricky proposition. Which version can I upgrade from and to? What about downgrades? The code selection process can get even more complex if you have dependencies such as AVE (ACI … More APIC Upgrade Tool