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 fabric policies


In this recipe, we will create an NTP policy and assign it to our pod. NTP is a good place to start, as having a common and synced time source is critical for third-party authentication, such as LDAP and logging.

In this recipe, we will use the Quick Start menu to create an NTP policy, in which we will define our NTP servers. We will then create a POD policy and attach our NTP policy to it. Lastly, we'll create a POD profile, which calls the policy and applies it to our pod (our fabric).

We can assign pods to different profiles, and we can share policies between policy groups. So we may have one NTP policy but different SNMP policies for different pods:

The ACI fabric is very flexible in this respect.

How to do it...

  1. From the Fabric menu, select Fabric Policies. From the Quick Start menu, select Create an NTP Policy:

 

  1. A new window will pop up, and here we'll give our new policy a name and (optional) description and enable it. We can also define any authentication keys...