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

Deploying the AVS


The Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) is an alternative to the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) we set up earlier.

The AVS is based around the Nexus 1000v switch but customized for ACI.

The benefits of the AVS are that it allows you to create a Virtual Tunnel End Point (VTEP) on the VMWare hosts. This enhances scalability (over the VDS) as we are not bound by a one-hop limit. One of the differences between using the DVS and the AVS is that the DVS uses LLDP for VM discovery whereas the AVS uses OpFlex.

Note

We need to install an additional plugin to vCenter to be able to run the AVS. You can download it from https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=282646785&softwareid=286280428&release=1.1 You will require a CCO account and the specific entitlement.

How to do it…

Earlier in this chapter, we created a vCenter domain. As part of this, we created a VDS. The other option would be to use the Cisco AVS (refer to the figure in step 5 in the Creating VMM domains...