[DC] ACI and APIC

ACI > Contructs

Fundamentals:

• Open and Secure
• Apps and Infrastructure
• Physical and Virtual
• On-Site and Cloud

Bringing up the Fabric:

• Physical requirements
  • Power
  • Cabling + mgmt0
  • Rack and Stack
• Power on/Connect to APICs
  • How many APICs
  • Fabric Name
  • Admin Password
  • Setup Fabric Network ( IP & VLAN)
• Log into the APIC (HTTP out of band)
  • NTP
  • Route Reflectors
  • MGMT IP Fabric
  • Leaf and Spine Name/#

Fabric Discovery

• Zero touch fabric, the controller does everything
• APIC uses LLDP to get information about the leaf switches it’s connected to
• First the leaf is dicovered and will be named (101)
• Then the Spine is connected and named  (201)
• Then the leafs are discovered (103,104)

ACI > Contracts

• Contracts functions as ACL
• Contracts control how one group can interact with another group within the ACI fabric
• Contracts can be between EPG’s, or between L3out and EPG’s.
• Contracts control who can see what routes between VRF’s

ACI > Contexts and Bridge domains

• The Bridge Domain is a layer 2 domain built with VXLAN overlays
• The Bridge Domain is always associated with a VRF even if it’s not doing any routing
• The Bridge Domain is carved in Endpoint Groups to which physical servers and virtual machines attach

Adding switches via the APIC

APIC > Firmware Upgrade

• Download firmware from Cisco
  • Controller software
  • Switch image
• Check firmware repository
• Controller firmware upgrade
• Firmware group
• Maintenance group
  • Best practice to create a maintenance group so you don’t upgrade all switches at once
  • maintenancegroup: 0dd switches
  • maintenancegroup: even switches

APIC > System settings

• NTP
• Route Reflectors
• MGMT IP Fabric
• Leaf and Spine Name/#

APIC > Admin > Config rollbacks

• Make snapshots
• Backup the fabric
• Backup tenant
• Schedule snapshots

APIC > Policy model

APIC > Network Centric Mode

• Create a Tenant
  • Create a VRF for the tenant
    • Create a VLAN 10 (bridge domain 10)
      • Create a Group 10 EPG
        • Put the servers in the Group
    • Create a VLAN 20 (bridge domain 20)
      • Create a Group 20 EPG
        • Put the servers in the Group

APIC > Application Centric Mode