Adam Raffe Cloud, Data Centre & Networking

Learning ACI

This is a series of blog posts I wrote a few years back whilst working on the Application Centric Infrastructure solution at Cisco. I no longer work at Cisco and won’t be updating these posts; however, I’m keeping them here as they may still be useful for people starting out with ACI.

Here is a consolidated list of blog entries in the Learning ACI series:

Part 1: Overview – Provides a very high level overview of ACI and what to expect from the blog series

Part 2: Bringing Up An ACI Fabric – Part 2 takes you through bringing up an ACI fabric for the first time, provisioning an APIC cluster and discovering the leaf and spine switching nodes in your network.

Part 3: Getting Familiar with the APIC – In this part, I take you through a tour of the APIC GUI, explaining what functionality is found under the main tabs.

Part 4: Application Profiles, EPGs, Contracts and Filters – In part 4, we discuss some of the most important policy constructs on the fabric and how they are used to define application requirements.

Part 5: Private Networks, Bridge Domains and Subnets – Part 5 discusses the main networking policies and constructs within ACI and how they relate to each other.

Part 6: Access Policies – In part 6, we walk through the process of creating an access policy to be used for bare metal host connectivity into the fabric.

Part 7: Basic Connectivity – In this installment, we discuss how to set up basic connectivity between two hosts across two EPGs.

Part 8: VMM Integration – Part 8 discusses the integration between ACI and the virtual machine environment.

Part 9: Layer 3 External Connectivity – In this part, I explain how to configure routing from the ACI fabric to an external device.

Part 10: Programming the ACI Fabric – In this part, we’ll take a look at some of the programmability options available within ACI.

Part 11: Transit Routing – In this part, I’m discussing the transit routing capability of the ACI fabric that came in with the 1.1(1j) release.

Part 12: Inter VRF and Inter-Tenant Communication – In this latest post, I’m taking a look at how to configure inter-VRF and inter-tenant communication on the ACI fabric.