Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a tightly integrated software-defined networking (SDN) solution that enables you to build a programmable network that can adapt to changing business needs. ACI is designed to simplify the network and reduce operational costs while increasing business agility.
The first thing you need to do is download the Cisco ACI Simulator from Cisco’s website. The download is a OVA file which can be imported into VirtualBox or VMWare. I will be using VirtualBox for this tutorial.
Once the OVA file has been imported, start up the virtual machine. The default login is username: admin password: cisco. The first thing you need to do is change the admin password.
Next, we need to set up networking for the ACI Simulator. The ACI Simulator uses two virtual Ethernet adapters. One adapter is for management traffic and the other is for data traffic.
For this tutorial, we will use the following network configuration:
Management adapter:
IP address: 192.168.1.100
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Default gateway: 192.168.1.1
Data adapter:
IP address: 10.0.0.100
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Once the networking has been configured, you should be able to access the ACI Simulator web interface at https://192.168.1.100. The default login is username: admin password: cisco.
The ACI Simulator web interface is divided into three sections: the Dashboard, the Fabric, and the Applications.
The Dashboard provides an overview of the ACI fabric and can be used to monitor fabric health and performance.
The Fabric section is where you will configure the ACI fabric. This is where you will add switches, configure vlans, create tenants, and so on.
The Applications section is where you will deploy and manage ACI applications. Cisco provides a number of pre-built applications such as load balancers, firewalls, and so on.
In this tutorial, we will focus on the Fabric section. The first thing we need to do is add a switch to the ACI fabric. Click on the “Add Switch” button in the top-right corner of the Fabric section.
In the “Add Switch” dialog, enter the following information:
Name: acisim
Switch Type: cisco_aci
Number of Ports: 48
Click the “Add” button to add the switch to the ACI fabric.
Next, we need to configure vlans on the switch. Click on the “Configure VLANs” button in the top-right corner of the Fabric section.
In the “Configure VLANs” dialog, enter the following information:
Name: default
VLAN ID: 1
Click the “Add” button to add the vlan to the switch.
Repeat the process for the following vlans:
Name: mgmt
VLAN ID: 2
Name: data
VLAN ID: 3
Now that the vlans have been configured, we need to create a tenant. A tenant is a logical container used to isolate workloads. Click on the “Create Tenant” button in the top-right corner of the Fabric section.
In the “Create Tenant” dialog, enter the following information:
Name: my-tenant
Click the “Create” button to create the tenant.
Once the tenant has been created, we need to add a network to the tenant. Click on the “Create Network” button in the top-right corner of the Fabric section.
In the “Create Network” dialog, enter the following information:
Name: my-network
Subnet: 10.0.0.0/24
Click the “Create” button to create the network.
Now that the network has been created, we need to add an application to the tenant. Click on the “Create Application” button in the top-right corner of the Fabric section.
In the “Create Application” dialog, enter the following information:
Name: my-app
Network: my-network
Click the “Create” button to create the application.
Once the application has been created, we need to add
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