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)

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 Intersight 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, remote storage, and other critical administrative tasks.

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.

Cisco has been at the forefront of developing a suite of standalone tools, collectively known as the Day 2 Operations Suite. Recently, Cisco has initiated the integration of these tools into a unified interface called NEXUS Dashboard, providing a consolidated view and shared data repositories for enhanced application correlation. This integration facilitates a comprehensive understanding of application performance and network events, leading to more efficient data center network management.

Cisco NEXUS Dashboard Insights 6.5 (NDI 6.5) offers many data sources of telemetry, such as Syslog, RIB, and FIB tables and streaming telemetry. It then ingests these datasets, extracts the metadata, and correlates against a daily updated database from Cisco. This telemetry and correlation of the metadata allow NDI to derive insights and suggest remediation actions for finding root cause analysis and predictive failure.