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

Integrating with F5


F5 stopped support for the standard ACI package back in December 2016. This is not to say, though, that they have shunned ACI--quite the opposite. They continue to embrace ACI, but getting the two technologies to coexist works slightly differently.

In this recipe, we will create a basic virtual server on the F5 BIG-IP and set this up on our APIC.

Getting ready

Before we can configure the APIC, we need to make sure that the F5 components are running and configured.

For this, we need iWorkflow (version 2.0.0 or higher) and a BIG-IP appliance. I am using iWorkflow-2.1.0.0.0.10285-scsi.ova and BIGIP-13.0.0.0.0.1645.ALL-scsi.ova. These are available for download from the F5 website (https://downloads.f5.com), and you can download free trials. 

These need to be imported into vCenter and the VMs started. Once started, run through the configuration wizards to set up the basic IP addressing, NTP, and DNS configuration. The BIG-IP device should be added into iWorkflow.

How to do it....