Category Archives: ACI

New APIC ACI 5.1 firmware – Cisco have gone colloquial

Posted on 2020/10/25 by

This is an absolute affirmation that Cisco only cares about North American users Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, Cisco, rant | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Making the most of ACI when routing between tenants via a Firewall

Posted on 2020/10/06 by

I’ll show you how you can enhance your ACI migration by using some ACI features that are practically impossible to implement on L3 Firewalls Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, ACI Tutorial, Cisco, configuration tutorial, Data Center, Data Centre | Leave a comment

ACI Version mismatch Alert. Don’t use v5 on APIC and v14 on Leaves

Posted on 2020/09/05 by

If you are stuck with some first-generation switches in your ACI fabric, you might be tempted to upgrade your APIC to version 5.x – maybe even attempt to upgrade your leaf switches to the companion v15.x. Let me tell you why you don’t want to do that. Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, Cisco, Data Center, Data Centre | Leave a comment

moquery – Cisco’s Mysterious Obscure ACI query utility

Posted on 2020/04/09 by

Take some of the mystery and obscurity out of Cisco’s Managed Object query. The final outcome will be that you will be equiped with the knowledge to write a script and adapt to suit your needs. Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, ACI Tutorial, Cisco, Master Class | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

ACI Inband Mangagment Route Leaking Kludge

Posted on 2019/12/01 by

When I was challenged with this: Hi @RedNectar , Right now I have a simple contract that allows SSH only: Scope set to global. TCP dst 22. “Both directions” and “reverse port filters” enabled. This contract is provided by the inband EPG … Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, aci inband management, ACI inband management tutorials, ACI Tutorial, Cisco | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Resolution Immediacy and Deployment Immediacy – ACI Master Class

Posted on 2018/08/17 by

When configuring ACI, have you ever wondered what those Resolution Immediacy options [Immediate | On Demand | Pre-provision] and the Deployment Immediacy options [Immediate | On Demand] do? Continue reading →

Posted in Access Policy Chain, ACI, ACI Tutorial, Cisco, Master Class, Nexus 9000 | Tagged , , ,

ARP Gleaning – ACI Master Class

Posted on 2018/08/13 by

The purpose of these Gleaning ARPs is simply to “tickle” the target station into sending a packet – not because the gateway needs the MAC address of the target! Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, ACI Tutorial, Cisco, Master Class | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

ISIS, COOP, BGP and MP-BGP in Cisco ACI

Posted on 2018/03/01 by

Let me start with a picture.  Imagine a simple 2leaf/2spine topology with HostA attached to to Leaf1 and with HostB attached to to Leaf2. Enter IS-IS. The leaves and spines will exchange IS-IS routing updates with each other so that Leaf1 sees that it has two equally good paths to reach Leaf2, and Leaf2 sees that it has two equally good paths to reach Leaf1. Now think about the hosts. This is where COOP comes in. BGP is not needed until an external router is connected. Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, ACI configuration, APIC, Cisco, Data Center, Data Centre, EPG, L3 Out, L3out | Tagged , ,

Non overlapping VTEP IP addresses in Cisco ACI

Posted on 2017/06/13 by

Cisco recommends that “The TEP IP address pool should not overlap with existing IP address pools that may be in use by the servers (in particular, by virtualized servers).”
Let me tell you a reason much closer to reality why you might want to avoid overlapping your Cisco ACI TEP addresses with your locally configured addressing scheme. Continue reading →

Posted in ACI, ACI configuration, APIC, Cisco, Data Center, Data Centre | Tagged , , , ,

Cisco ACI Naming Standards

Posted on 2017/05/19 by

Have you ever wondered what a L3 Out object is, when there no facility to create an object called L3 Out? I managed to solve this and many other ambiguities by developing and adopting a consistent naming standard. Continue reading →

Posted in Access Policies, ACI, ACI configuration, Cisco, Data Center, Data Centre, Nexus, Nexus 9000, SDN, Software Defined Networking | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment