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Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1
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, 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)
The Vision and Reality of ACI Anywhere
A look at where Cisco ACI Anywhere got its start, where it is today and where WWT sees it going in the future through the lens of four business use cases.
NEXUS Dashboard, NEXUS Insights and AppDynamics Lab
Over the years, Cisco has developed various ACI tools (now for DCNM and NX-OS and eventually public cloud visibility) known as the day 2 operations suite. The tools are Network Assurance Engine (NAE) and NEXUS Insights (NI is now the combination of Network Insights Resources (NIR) and Network insights Advisor (NIA)). Cisco has embarked on combining NAE and NI into a single pane of glass view and providing sharable data lakes for all apps, allowing for correlating application performance and fabric events.
Cisco DCNM and NDFC
Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), now superseded by Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), is Cisco's version of an EVPN fabric controller. DCNM, or NDFC, has three essential primary components. Spines that act like physical aggregation points for all of the leaves. Leaves provide endpoint aggregation and link to the spine. The last essential component is the controller, which in the case of DCNM is a single device or HA pair, and for NDFC, it is a Nexus Dashboard cluster with a loaded NDFC application.
In most cases, DCNM or NDFC will utilize OSPF for the underlay and VXLAN EVPN with MP-BGP as the overlay on Nexus 9000 switches. These fabric controllers are easier to use than similar fabric technologies on smaller to medium size networks, as most variables work out of the box without needing to change them. To what is known in the industry as a point and click your way to happiness.
Migrating Cisco DCNM to NDFC Lab
This lab will enable a student to migrate Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) to Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC).
The Risk of End of Support (EoS) Infrastructure in Your Data Center
This article examines what End of Support/End of Life means, how it can affect your business and steps to making a plan to refresh your data center.