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Cisco ACI Cookbook
Cisco ACI Cookbook

Cisco ACI Cookbook: A Practical Guide to Maximize Automated Solutions and Policy-Drive Application Profiles

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Cisco ACI Cookbook

Configuring Policies and Tenants

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • 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

Introduction

We will start configuring the ACI fabric by creating some policies and a couple of tenants.

The ACI policy model is all about mapping application requirements to policies. We need tenant A to talk to an SQL server; we create a policy for that. We also need tenant A to talk the storage system, so we create a policy for that.

The APIC looks after the policies. When we make a change to an object within the fabric, it is the job of the APIC to apply this change to the policy model, which then makes the change to the affected endpoint. Such an example would be adding a new device to the fabric. Communication with the new device is prohibited until the policy model is updated to include the new device.

There are different policies, but they can be split into fairly distinct groups: those that govern the ACI fabric as a whole and those that are concerned with tenants.

All the policies are recorded...

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...

Creating access policies

Access policies control the operation of switch ports, allowing connectivity to resources such as storage and compute, hypervisors, and layer 4 to layer 7 devices and protocols such as CDP, LLDP, and STP.

In this recipe, we are going to look at access policies and enable a preconfigured policy. We will then look at how to override this policy on a per-port basis, and also to override blocks of ports on a leaf.

How to do it...

  1. From the Fabric menu, select Access Policies. Go to Interface Policies | Policies | CDP Interface. We can see that there is already a default policy:
  1. The default is for CDP to be disabled. So switch the Admin State to Enabled, and click on SUBMIT in the bottom corner of the window:
  1. This...

Creating tenants

Tenants can be anything we want them to be (within reason): they can be a customer, a business unit within an enterprise, or a grouping of policies. The term 'tenant' is flexible, but each tenant is (by default) an isolated unit within the fabric. It is a logical container, one that can remain self-contained or, through contracts, share resources with other tenants.

The MIT for the tenant is as follows:

Tenant MIT

As you can see from the diagram, tenants contain some different components, including application profiles, bridge domains, VRFs (also referred to as contexts), and contracts. Some of these components, such as bridge domains, have their own components, such as subnets.

We have a couple of tenants preconfigured. These are the “common” tenant (common), which holds policies for shared services, such as firewalls and DNS settings; the “infrastructure”...

Configuring bridge domains

Bridge domains (BDs) provide layer 2 forwarding within the fabric as well as a layer 2 boundary. A BD must be linked to VRF and must have at least one subnet associated with it. BDs define the unique layer 2 MAC address space and also the flood domain (if flooding is enabled). 

Bridge domains can be public, private, or shared. Public bridge domains are where the subnet can be exported to a routed connection, whereas private ones apply only within the tenancy. Shared bridge domains can be exported to multiple VRFs within the same tenant, or across tenants when part of a shared service.

In this recipe, we will create a bridge domain and, along with it, define a VRF and a subnet for communication within the tenancy. 

How to do it...

...

Introduction


We will start configuring the ACI fabric by creating some policies and a couple of tenants.

The ACI policy model is all about mapping application requirements to policies. We need tenant A to talk to an SQL server; we create a policy for that. We also need tenant A to talk the storage system, so we create a policy for that.

The APIC looks after the policies. When we make a change to an object within the fabric, it is the job of the APIC to apply this change to the policy model, which then makes the change to the affected endpoint. Such an example would be adding a new device to the fabric. Communication with the new device is prohibited until the policy model is updated to include the new device.

There are different policies, but they can be split into fairly distinct groups: those that govern the ACI fabric as a whole and those that are concerned with tenants.

All the policies are recorded in the MIT, or management information tree.

The MIT

In this chapter, we will start by creating...

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...

Creating access policies


Access policies control the operation of switch ports, allowing connectivity to resources such as storage and compute, hypervisors, and layer 4 to layer 7 devices and protocols such as CDP, LLDP, and STP.

In this recipe, we are going to look at access policies and enable a preconfigured policy. We will then look at how to override this policy on a per-port basis, and also to override blocks of ports on a leaf.

How to do it...

  1. From the Fabric menu, select Access Policies. Go to Interface Policies | Policies | CDP Interface. We can see that there is already a default policy:
  1. The default is for CDP to be disabled. So switch the Admin State to Enabled, and click on SUBMIT in the bottom corner of the window:
  1. This has enabled CDP globally, but what if we need to be a little more selective and disable on a single port?

 

  1. Right-click on CDP Interface and select Create CDP Interface Policy.

 

  1. Name the new policy CDP-OFF and set the state to Disabled.
  1. Click on SUBMIT.
  2. We now have two...

Creating tenants


Tenants can be anything we want them to be (within reason): they can be a customer, a business unit within an enterprise, or a grouping of policies. The term 'tenant' is flexible, but each tenant is (by default) an isolated unit within the fabric. It is a logical container, one that can remain self-contained or, through contracts, share resources with other tenants.

The MIT for the tenant is as follows:

Tenant MIT

As you can see from the diagram, tenants contain some different components, including application profiles, bridge domains, VRFs (also referred to as contexts), and contracts. Some of these components, such as bridge domains, have their own components, such as subnets.

We have a couple of tenants preconfigured. These are the “common” tenant (common), which holds policies for shared services, such as firewalls and DNS settings; the “infrastructure” tenant (infra), which holds policies and VXLAN pools; and the “management” tenant (mgmt), which is used for out-of-band...

Configuring bridge domains


Bridge domains (BDs) provide layer 2 forwarding within the fabric as well as a layer 2 boundary. A BD must be linked to VRF and must have at least one subnet associated with it. BDs define the unique layer 2 MAC address space and also the flood domain (if flooding is enabled). 

Bridge domains can be public, private, or shared. Public bridge domains are where the subnet can be exported to a routed connection, whereas private ones apply only within the tenancy. Shared bridge domains can be exported to multiple VRFs within the same tenant, or across tenants when part of a shared service.

In this recipe, we will create a bridge domain and, along with it, define a VRF and a subnet for communication within the tenancy. 

How to do it...

  1. We start by going into the tenant we created in the previous recipe and going to Networking | Bridge Domains.
  1. Click on Actions, and then on Create Bridge Domain.

 

 

  1. This launches a new window. Here, we name our bridge domain and assign a VRF...

Configuring contexts


So far, we have configured a tenant and created a bridge domain and context for it. A context, also known as a VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) is a unique layer 3 forwarding domain. We can have multiple VRFs within a tenant, and VRFs can be associated with more than one bridge domain (but we cannot associate a bridge domain with more than one VRF).

In this recipe, we will create a second VRF under TenantA and a new bridge domain.

How to do it...

  1. From the Networking menu under the tenant, select VRFs.
  1. From the Actions menu, select Create VRF.

 

 

  1. Give the VRF a name, and select any applicable options. Here, I have chosen to add a DNS label of VRF2. We can create a new bridge domain (this is the default option) at this stage as well.

 

 

  1. Click on NEXT, select the Forwarding setting (such as Optimize), and change any defaults (which I have not changed here).
  1. When you have done this, click on FINISH. The new VRF will be shown underneath the first VRF we created.

How it works....

Creating application network profiles


Application profiles (APs) are containers for the grouping of endpoint groups (EPGs). We can have more than one EPG with an AP. For example, an AP could group a web server with the backend database, with storage, and so on. EPGs are assigned to different bridge domains.

Application profiles define different aspects to the tenancy, governing security, quality of service (QoS), service-level agreements (SLAs), and layer 4 to layer 7 services.

APs are so intrinsically linked to EPGs (and contracts to a lesser extent) that it is harder to create these as separate tasks. For this reason, we will create them in one recipe. As you can see from the following screenshot, we are even guided in the Quick Start menu to create the EPGs and contacts when we create the application profile.

If we click on the grid-style icon next to the play button, the help window for the task will pop up.

How to do it...

  1. We can create an AP from the Quick Start menu by clicking on the...
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Key benefits

  • • Confidently provision your virtual and physical infrastructure for application deployment
  • • Integrate Cisco ACI with hypervisors and other third party devices
  • • Packed with powerful recipes to automate your IT operations

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

If you are a network administrator, system administrator, or engineer and are aware of the basics of Cisco ACI but want to start using it to automate your tasks, then this book is for you

What you will learn

  • • Master the Cisco ACI architecture
  • • Discover the ACI fabric with easy-to-follow steps
  • • Set up quality of service within ACI
  • • Configure external networks with Cisco ACI
  • • Integrate with VMware and track VMware virtual machines
  • • Configure apply and verify access policies
  • • Extend or migrate a VMware virtual-machine LAN inside the ACI fabric
  • • Monitor ACI with third party tools and troubleshoot issues

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : May 25, 2017
Length: 424 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781787129214
Vendor :
Cisco
Concepts :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : May 25, 2017
Length: 424 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781787129214
Vendor :
Cisco
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Understanding Components and the ACI Fabric Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Configuring Policies and Tenants Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Hypervisor Integration (and Other Third Parties) Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Routing in ACI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
ACI Security Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Implementing Quality of Service in ACI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Network Programmability with ACI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Monitoring ACI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Troubleshooting ACI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
An End-to-End Example Using the NX-OS CLI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Ahmad Maher Che Mohd Adib Jul 25, 2018
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Love it!
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Smith J. Mar 22, 2019
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This is one of the best Cisco ACI fundamentals book out there. Those who want to have a very very basic understanding of what Cisco ACI is and what id does - this book is the best. The way the author describes about each components of Cisco ACI, what it is and how to do it - is just amazing. He takes us to the Cisco ACI world in simple words and in a understandable manner. Anyone who is interested to know the fundamentals of Cisco ACI, they will love this book. I would like to say thanks for the author for this book and also to encourage the author to write more books like this. Thank you.
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Good one
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Cliente Amazon Mar 19, 2019
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Es bueno, me ha dado una visión bastante cercana aunque lo recomiendo para profesionales interesados en deployment, nivel medio. Está muy bien presentado, ordenado y explicado. Falta algo más de teoría y diagramas de ejemplo, de soluciones posibles con Cisco ACI + tecnologías y entornos: IBM vmware citrix asa rest json ...
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amitava ghorui May 15, 2019
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I don't want to by this book but it is showing in my order list as purchased.I have not make any payment for this product also not getting any options to cancel this order. Pls help me to cancel this order.
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