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
Starting from ACI Release 5.0(1) Cisco has started supporting ACI SR-MPLS handoff for L3 Outs. If you are not familiar with Segment Routing concepts do not despair. Once you see the benefits of using Segment Routing you will realize why this is such a good way of doing L3 Outs. If you are familiar with … More ACI SR-MPLS Handoff for L3 Outs
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
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 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
Are you using MSO (ACI Multisite Orchestrator), in standalone mode ? Well, please do not do that in production. Often times in a lab environment you will be tempted to do this. I’m guilty of doing this myself on the Cisco ACI Advanced Bootcamp ACI training labs, simply because I’m too lazy to bring … More Cisco MSO Standalone Upgrade
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
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