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

Introduction


Given that there will be more than one person administering the ACI fabric, it makes sense that each have their own user account. This is a necessity for certifications such as PCI-DSS, and also just makes sense from an auditing perspective.

In this chapter, we will look at how we can connect to third-party authentication sources, such as RADIUS, TACACS+, and LDAP, and how we can limit the users down by a per-tenant or per-function basis.

AAA and multiple tenant support

ACI has been built with security in mind. Adding local users and connecting to external authentication services (such as RADIUS, TACACS+, and LDAP) is all very straightforward. Security is a constant theme throughout ACI--just look at contracts for an example. 

Because of this focus on security, we can perform actions such as limiting the abilities of a user on a per-tenant basis and being very granular about the aspects of the fabric that they can and cannot read from or write to. The abilities of a user can be...