Book Image

Cisco ACI Cookbook

By : Stuart Fordham
Book Image

Cisco ACI Cookbook

By: Stuart Fordham

Overview of this book

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a tough architecture that automates IT tasks and accelerates data-center application deployments. This book focuses on practical recipes to help you quickly build, manage, and customize hybrid environment for your organization using Cisco ACI. You will begin by understanding the Cisco ACI architecture and its major components. You will then configure Cisco ACI policies and tenants. Next you will connect to hypervisors and other third-party devices. Moving on, you will configure routing to external networks and within ACI tenants and also learn to secure ACI through RBAC. Furthermore, you will understand how to set up quality of service and network programming with REST, XML, Python and so on. Finally you will learn to monitor and troubleshoot ACI in the event of any issues that arise. By the end of the book, you will gain have mastered automating your IT tasks and accelerating the deployment of your applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating tenants


Tenants can be anything we want them to be (within reason): they can be a customer, a business unit within an enterprise, or a grouping of policies. The term 'tenant' is flexible, but each tenant is (by default) an isolated unit within the fabric. It is a logical container, one that can remain self-contained or, through contracts, share resources with other tenants.

The MIT for the tenant is as follows:

Tenant MIT

As you can see from the diagram, tenants contain some different components, including application profiles, bridge domains, VRFs (also referred to as contexts), and contracts. Some of these components, such as bridge domains, have their own components, such as subnets.

We have a couple of tenants preconfigured. These are the “common” tenant (common), which holds policies for shared services, such as firewalls and DNS settings; the “infrastructure” tenant (infra), which holds policies and VXLAN pools; and the “management” tenant (mgmt), which is used for out-of-band...