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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Deployment Workshop (ACI-DW3)

  • Overview

    Description, Pre requisites

  • Content

    Lessons, Course Structure

Course Overview

The ACI Deployment Workshop takes engineers and technicians with some ACI experience through the process of deploying an ACI solution from scratch. The initial part of the course revises the basic concepts required to deploy ACI and is accompanied by a series of step-by-step labs with some automated stages. Once the foundation is laid, the students are challenged to design and deploy a sample ACI deployment without step-by-step instructions. The challenge exercise has several extensions that students can attempt once the base configuration is built. 

Housley will make the lab resources available 24/7 for the duration of the course.  

  • Ratio of 60% hands on to 40% theory 

Pre-requisites

All attendees have working knowledge of  

  • ACI concepts and configuration 
  • Layer 2 operation 
  • TCP/IP layer 3 and 4 concepts 
  • OSPF and BGP Routing Protocols 

Students will be given three hours to build a complete working ACI implementation from scratch based on a diagrammatic model of our ACI Lab including building attachments for: 

  • Two Bare Metal Hosts in two EPGs 
    • One host is directly connected to a leaf 
    • One host is directly connected to a FEX that connects to leaf 
    • Two hosts connected via a VPC to an external L2 Switch 
  • Two ESXi Hosts  
    • One host is directly connected to a leaf 
    • One host is directly connected to a FEX that connects to leaf 
  • Four VMs in an integrated VMware VMM Domain, two VMs in each of the two EPGs 
  • OSPF Connectivity to a pre-configured External Router with an attached host 
  • BGP Connectivity to a pre-configured External Router  

If students are unable to complete the challenge, Housley will scale back the scope of the course to suit the audience 

Target Audience

  • Participants will have base understanding of ACI concepts 

Duration

  • 3 days

Day 1

  • Deployment and feature configuration 
    • ACI theory review – key points with class discussion 
    • Access Policies 
      • Leaf Profiles  
      • Interface Profiles/Interface Selectors 
      • Interface Policy Groups/Interface Policies 
      • Attachable Access Entity Profiles
      • Physical Domains  
      • VLAN Pools 
    • Tenant Policies 
        • VRFs 
        • Bridge Domains 
        • EPGs 
        • Contracts 

Challenge lab

  • Students will build the base lab that is to be used as the base model for all advanced exercises 

Day 2

  • Advanced Access policies
    • More detailed look at configuration options
    • Discussion about design options
  • External Routed connectivity
    • OSPF, BGP and Static routes
    • More detailed look at configuration options
    • Discussion about design options

Labs: L3 Outs

  • A variety of L3 Out scenarios are added to the lab environment.
    • OSPF L3Out
    • BGP L3 Out
    • Static Routes
    • Transit Routing

Day 3

  • Virtualization integration – VMware 
  • Migration of BMH servers to VMware 
  • Migration options discussed 
    • Full VMM integration 
    • Static mapping 
    • Migrating existing vDS into VMware VMM 

Labs 

    • Lab design is modified to migrate BMHs to VMware VMM Domain