Cisco ACI

Terms

ACI — Application Centric Infrastructure

ESG — Endpoint Security Groups

POD

A set of leaf and spine nodes controlled with an APIC cluster

Multi-POD

• Multiple PODs connected via VXLAN
• Multiple PODs managed via the same APIC cluster

Spine Back-to-Back

The recommended topology for connecting a 2 pods, that are each 2 spines, is a full-mesh.

Sharding

• A way ACI achieves quorum
• Uses multiple active DBs
• 3 to 7 copies

L3Out

The ACI fabric runs a routing protocol like OSPF or BGP to inject it’s NLRI info into a shared routing fabric

L3Out Transit Routing

The ACI fabric can be used as transit, between L3Out Endpoints.

References

Cisco Live - Introduction to ACI - Chris Merkel - BRKDCN-1601

Cisco Live - Cisco ACI Multi-Prod Design and Deployment - John Weston - BRKDCN-2949

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure - ACI Fabric L3Out White Paper - Cisco

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) - Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)