Cisco ACI Fundamentals
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In this Cisco ACI tutorial I will be cover all the fundamentals of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. I will explain all the elements of ACI and give a brief overview of the APIC, Tenants, EPGs, VRFs, Contracts, Bridge Groups, AEP's and the fabric.
ACI Terminology
APIC - Application Policy Infrastructure Controller
ACI Fabric
The Cisco ACI fabric is a highly scalable, multipath, high-performance leaf-and-spine architecture which provides a Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) overlay for the tenant space.
In simple terms the ACI Fabric is made up of the Nexus 9000 switches and connectivity between them. All devices are connected via equal cost multipath routing using ISIS.
Note: Cisco ACI can only run on Nexus 9000 switches, it cannot run on any other Cisco switches or switches from any other vendor.
Tenants
Cisco ACI vs NSX
Cisco ACI Simulator
Last month I attended a Cisco ACI training course at Bedfont Lakes UK.
The training was provided by Lumos Consulting and delivered by Mark Snow.
I was joined by other network engineers from the UK and one had even traveled from Dubai
At the beginning of the week I had not heard much about the Cisco Application Infrastructure and by the end of the week we are deploying installations using Python.
It was an amazing learning week and I am looking forward now to my first proof of concept deployment.
I will be writing more posts about ACI very soon
In a nutshell it is basically a way to deploy a fabric across a Nexus 9000 switch environment enabling developers to have more control over deploying new network environments for their applications without involving network admins.
It is really aimed at the large SP environment or very large enterprise.
The troubleshooting documentation is maintained on GitHub and the last book can be downloaded for free from here
For more information in dedicated Cisco ACI Training courses I suggest you contact Lumos Consulting.
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