Cisco's Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) allows an ACI policy to be managed with a single pane of glass to for the whole environment. The key to NDO, the administrator is able to create consistent security and connectivity policies across multiple physical, and virtual sites. This lab will go through all the steps necessary to bring up an ACI Multi-Site environment from two existing ACI fabrics.

This lab is the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1, and after completion, the student can launch Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 to complete the entire lab. The lab uses the ACI virtual simulator based on ACI Version 6.1(3f), emulating an APIC, 2 leafs, and a spine. Part 2 uses a shared physical ACI fabric to complete the policy and verify data plane connectivity. The ACI Virtual Simulator was needed to demo the building of the ACI fabric from scratch, bootstrapping the APIC, adding the spine and leafs, fabric discovery, and completing VMM integration. Since the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab, Part 2 is a shared on-demand environment, to decouple the APIC build process from the APIC policy creation. Due to limitations, the virtual ACI fabric is a control plane-only simulator, and no data plane testing (Ping, SSH) can get done for validation. Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 uses a Tenant inside of a physical ACI, and data plane functionality can get tested ( Ping, SSH)

This lab is a continuation of the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1 to allow students to explore the basics of ACI Constructs, building an Application Profile, EPGs and Bridge domains, Policy Filters, and Contracts. The students then connect the ACI fabric to external layers 2 and 3 devices. The lab then finishes with ACI micro-segmentation inside an EPG to show a zero-trust model. Unlike Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1, which uses a simulator due to resource sharing with other students, this lab uses the latest ACI hardware and allows the student to test real-world data plane connectivity inside and outside the fabric.

The Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform serves as a unified management interface for diverse data center networks, offering a shared environment to operate Cisco's suite of data center services, including Nexus Dashboard Insights (NDI), Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) and NEXUS Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC). This lab will guide the user on the necessary administrative steps to set up the NEXUS Dashboard platform. These include backup, upgrades, authentication, remote storage, and other critical administrative tasks.