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.

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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Understanding Components and the ACI Fabric
Understanding Components and the ACI Fabric
Introduction
Understanding ACI and the APIC
An overview of the ACI fabric
Converting Cisco from Nexus NX-OS mode to ACI mode
ACI fabric overlay
An introduction to the GUI
2
Configuring Policies and Tenants
Configuring Policies and Tenants
Introduction
Creating fabric policies
Creating access policies
Creating tenants
Configuring bridge domains
Configuring contexts
Creating application network profiles
Creating endpoint groups
Using contracts between tenants
Creating filters
Creating contracts within tenants
Creating management contracts
3
Hypervisor Integration (and Other Third Parties)
Hypervisor Integration (and Other Third Parties)
Introduction
Installing device packages
Creating VMM domains and integrating VMWare
Associating vCenter domains with a tenant
Deploying the AVS
Discovering VMWare endpoints
Adding virtual machines to a tenant
Tracking ACI endpoints
Integrating with A10
Deploying the ASAv
Integrating with OpenStack
Integrating with F5
Integrating with Citrix NetScaler
4
Routing in ACI
Routing in ACI
Introduction
Creating a DHCP relay
Utilizing DNS
Routing with BGP
Configuring a layer-3 outside interface for tenant networks
Associating a bridge domain with an external network
Using route reflectors
Routing with OSPF
Routing with EIGRP
Using IPv6 within ACI
Setting up multicast for ACI tenants
Configuring multicast on the bridge domain and interfaces
ACI transit routing and route peering
5
ACI Security
ACI Security
Introduction
Creating local users
Creating security domains
Limiting users to tenants
Connecting to a RADIUS server
Connecting to an LDAP server
Connecting to a TACACS+ server
6
Implementing Quality of Service in ACI
Implementing Quality of Service in ACI
Introduction
Preserving existing CoS settings
Configuring user-defined classes
Creating a basic QoS configuration
Verifying QoS
7
Network Programmability with ACI
Network Programmability with ACI
Introduction
Browsing the object store using the Object Store Browser
Programming the ACI through REST
Authenticating through REST and XML
Creating a tenant using REST and XML
Deleting a tenant using REST and XML
Creating an APN and an EPG using REST and XML
Creating an application profile and EPG using REST
Authenticating through REST and JSON
Creating a tenant using REST and JSON
Using the Python SDK
Logging into the APIC using Cobra
Creating a tenant using the SDK
8
Monitoring ACI
Monitoring ACI
Introduction
Finding faults
Viewing events
Navigating the audit logs
Setting up Call Home
Configuring SNMP
Configuring Syslog
Configuring NetFlow
9
Troubleshooting ACI
Troubleshooting ACI
Introduction
Layer 2 troubleshooting
FEX troubleshooting
SSL troubleshooting
Switch diagnostics
APIC troubleshooting
Upgrading the ACI software
VMM troubleshooting
Routing verifications
Troubleshooting external connectivity
Multicast troubleshooting
QoS troubleshooting
10
An End-to-End Example Using the NX-OS CLI
An End-to-End Example Using the NX-OS CLI
Introduction
Setting up in-band and out-of-band access to the nodes
Creating the security domain
Creating the VLAN domain
Creating the VMWare domain
Creating the tenant
Creating the VRF
Creating the bridge domains
Creating the applications and EPGs
Creating the contract
Creating an L4-L7 device
Creating service templates
Setting up the client VMs

Configuring user-defined classes

There are three user-defined classes: Level1, Level2, and Level3.

We do not have the option to create any more, but we can edit the ones that are there.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to Fabric | Access Policies | Global Policies | QOS Class Policies.
  2. Select Level1 from the menu, or double-click on it in the workspace:
  1. Change the bandwidth allocation to 25%, and set the CoS field to cos 1.
  2. Tick PFC Admin State:
  1. Click on Submit.

How it works...

Once we select a CoS marking, we must enable the PFC Admin State, which changes the congestion algorithm to No Drop. If we do no select the PFC Admin State, we will receive a warning when we click on Submit:

PFC stands for priority flow control: it prevents frame loss when there is congestion within the network and works on a per-CoS basis.

There's more...

Apart from the three user-defined classes, there are three reserved classes. The reserved classes are not configurable by the user, however.

The three reserved classes are:

  • IFC 
  • Control...
Previous Section
End of Section 4
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