Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Power Workshop (ACI-PW5)
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Overview
Description, Pre requisites -
Content
Lessons, Course Structure
Course Overview
This ACI Power Workshop is a technical delivery that provides essential skills to personnel involved in deploying a base ACI environment. It covers key topics areas relevant to common deployment scenarios and is accompanied by a series of step-by-step labs. Each student is allocated four bare metal hosts, a router, two external hosts, two ESXi servers and fours VMs that they configure for ACI, including:
- Access Policies
- A Tenant, VRF and Bridge Domains
- An Application Profile and EPGs
- Filters and Contracts
- External L3 connectivity (L3Out)
- Virtual Machine Manager (vSphere) integration
Housley will make the lab resources available 24/7 for the duration of the course.
- Ratio of 60% hands on to 40% theory
Audience
- Participants will have base understanding of ACI concepts.
Pre-requisites
All attendees have working knowledge of
- Layer 2 operation
- TCP/IP layer 3 and 4 concepts
- OSPF and BGP Routing Protocols
Duration
- 5 days
Outline
Topics
- ACI Overview
- ACI Design Fundamentals
- ACI Access Policy model
- ACI Tenant Model
- Connecting ACI to Existing L2 Infrastructure
- Connecting to Existing L3 Infrastructure
- ACI Fabric Operation and Forwarding
- ACI Hypervisor Integration
- ACI L4-7 Integration
- ACI Management
- ACI Mulisite Overview (Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator)
Day 1
- ACI Overview
- What is ACI? And why use it?
- ACI Configuration
- ACI Design Fundamentals
- ACI Component Overview
- APIC Introduction
- ACI Initial Setup Overview
- Management Access
- Access Policy Model
- Access Policies
- Interface Policy Groups/Interface Policies
- Attachable Access Entity Profiles
- Physical Domains
- VLAN Pools
Labs
- Discover the ACI GUI and CLI User Interfaces
- Validate ACI Discovery
- Create Access Policies for Bare Metal hosts.
Day 2
- Lab Review from Day 1
- Tenant Policies
- ACI Logical Model
- VRFs/Bridge Domains/EPGs
- Design Options
- Enforcing Policies
- Filters & Contracts
- Strategies for allowing full communication between EPGs
- Connecting ACI to Existing L2 Infrastructure
- vPC Configuration in ACI Fabric
- L2 Design Considerations
- MisCabling Protocol (MCP)
Labs
- Discover the ACI GUI and CLI User Interfaces
- Validate ACI Discovery
- Create Access Policies for Bare Metal hosts
- Create a Tenant and Network Model
- Deploy Two-Tier Application Profile
- Build Contracts between EPGs
- Verify VPCs and Configure External L2
Day 3
- Lab Review from Day 2
- Connecting to Existing L3 Infrastructure
- L3 Operations
- L3 Outs
- External EPGs (L3 EPGs)
- Configuration Tips
- OSPF Validation
- ACI Fabric Operation and Forwarding
- Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) Basics
- Endpoint Learning & Lookup
- Fabric Forwarding
Labs
- Configuring External Layer 3 Connections
- Configure BGP
Day 4
- Lab Review from Day 3
- ACI Hypervisor Integration
- ACI Hypervisor Integration Overview
- Integration with VMware VDS
- ACI L4-7 Integration
- Service Appliance Insertion Without ACI L4-L7 Service Graph
- Service Appliance Insertion via ACI L4-L7 Service Graph
- Service Graph Policy Based Redirect (PBR) Introduction
Labs
- Prepare VMware ESXi Hosts and vCenter for ACI
- Register a VMM Domain with vCenter
- Add ESXi Hosts and VMs to vCenter
- Configure Service Graph PBR
- Configure BGP
Day 5
- Lab Review from Day 4
- ACI Management
- Out-of-Band Management
- In-band Management
- Configuration Backup
- Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting
- Role-Based Access Control
- Cisco ACI Upgrade
- ACI Multisite Overview (Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator)
- Multi-Site Overview
- ISN and Routing
- Spine Addressing and Routing
- EVPN and EP Advertising
- Traffic forwarding
- Nexus Dashboard User Interface
Labs
- In-band Management
- RBAC
- Challenge lab – rebuild Tenant (from ACI or NDO)