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
ACI is different. I know, this may come as a shock to any CCIE or Network Engineer who may have wondered into the APIC GUI to configure an interface, only to be met with terms like, “Physical Domain”, or “AAEP”. But, it is different, and different, I would argue, for more good than bad. And, … More ACI Fabric Access Policies for CCIEs
Configuring Out-of-Band connectivity to your ACI Fabric devices is a critical component to successfully maintaining and operating your datacenter. When it comes to configuring OOB connectivity to your devices (Leafs, Spines, and APIC Controllers), you’ll have need to do two things to get things going: All devices will need static OOB addresses (APIC Controllers, Leafs, … More ACI: Configuring Out-of-Band (OOB) access for your Fabric
Prerequisites Make sure and have the appropriate Contracts configured for OOB to permit the access to the desired port. If you do not have this in place, the traffic destined to the new port will be killed by the contracts. While not a prerequisite, Since HTTPs access via the GUI is generally the “front … More Changing the default port for HTTP(s) access to the APIC GUI