This lab is the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1, and after completion, the student can launch Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 to complete the entire lab. The lab uses the ACI virtual simulator based on ACI Version 6, emulating an APIC, 2 leafs, and a spine. Part 2 uses a shared physical ACI fabric to complete the policy and verify data plane connectivity. The ACI Virtual Simulator was needed to demo the building of the ACI fabric from scratch, bootstrapping the APIC, adding the spine and leafs, fabric discovery, and completing VMM integration. Since the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab, Part 2 is a shared on-demand environment, to decouple the APIC build process from the APIC policy creation. Due to limitations, the virtual ACI fabric is a control plane-only simulator, and no data plane testing (Ping, SSH) can get done for validation. Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 uses a Tenant inside of a physical ACI, and data plane functionality can get tested ( Ping, SSH)

Cisco's Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) allows an ACI policy to be managed with a single pane of glass to for the whole environment. The key to NDO, the administrator is able to create consistent security and connectivity policies across multiple physical, and virtual sites. This lab will go through all the steps necessary to bring up an ACI Multi-Site environment from two existing ACI fabrics.

This lab is a continuation of the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1 to allow students to explore the basics of ACI Constructs, building an Application Profile, EPGs and Bridge domains, Policy Filters, and Contracts. The students then connect the ACI fabric to external layers 2 and 3 devices. The lab then finishes with ACI micro-segmentation inside an EPG to show a zero-trust model. Unlike Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1, which uses a simulator due to resource sharing with other students, this lab uses the latest ACI hardware and allows the student to test real-world data plane connectivity inside and outside the fabric.

Over the past few years many customers deploying ACI have opted for using the "Network-Centric" approach for implementing their ACI installations. Customers who no want to migrate to a Application-Centric approach often find their workloads are spread across multiple subnets, and grouping them by application is difficult. This lab provides a technique on how to make this migration simpler

The goal of this lab is to show how policy-based redirection to a L4-7 device can be used with a single bridge domain needed for Application Centric (ACI) fabrics. The use of a single bridge domain and single PBR redirection is known as "one -armed mode."

Over the years, Cisco has developed various ACI tools (now for DCNM and NX-OS and eventually public cloud visibility) known as the day 2 operations suite. The tools are Network Assurance Engine (NAE) and NEXUS Insights (NI is now the combination of Network Insights Resources (NIR) and Network insights Advisor (NIA)). Cisco has embarked on combining NAE and NI into a single pane of glass view and providing sharable data lakes for all apps, allowing for correlating application performance and fabric events.

The goal of this lab is to show how policy-based redirection to a L4-7 device can be used with a single bridge domain needed for Cisco ACI fabrics. The use of a single bridge domain and single PBR redirection is known as "one-armed mode."

The Network Assurance Engine is one of the best integrated day two operations suites providing unparalleled visibility into a data center network. Look for this type of visibility across the multiple domains of WAN, LAN, DC and cloud as Cisco rolls this fabric analytic and flow engines to manage and report on misconfigurations, bugs and traffic drops from a single platform, the Network Assurance Engine.