cisco aci home lab

Short overview about Cisco Aci Home Lab and what's good to know about.

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.

Read more related to Cisco ACI: Cisco aci firewall
ACI is well suited for home labs because it is very easy to deploy and manage. The Cisco ACI Simulator is a great tool for learning and experimentation. In this article, I will show you how to set up a basic ACI home lab using the Cisco ACI Simulator.

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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