Application Centric Infrastructure

  • Cisco Applicaton Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC)

  • Single point of management and automation for ACI Switches (ACI Fabric)

  • Currently has two model and generations:

    • APIC-L2 (Large) and APIC-M2 (Medium) - C220 M4

    • APIC-L1 (Large) and APIC-M1 (Medium) - C220 M3

  • Servers scale out to form a management cluster

    • Cluster of 3 is minimum supported design

    • Leaf port density determins cluster requirements

ACI Network Topology

  • All leafs uplink to all spines with 40/100GE

  • APICs connect to leafs with redundant 10GE links

  • Leafs do not plug into leafs

  • Spines do not plug into spines

  • Traffic flow is Host > Leaf > Spine > Leaf > Host

  • Scale out bandwidth by adding more spines

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