The amount of data that businesses and individuals create is increasing rapidly year after year. As a result, data center networks continue to grow, and they are becoming more and more complicated to manage and monitor using traditional tools. Automation and programmability across data centers will be necessary to enhance network performance, redundancy, and visibility and also to reduce complexity. A software-defined networking (SDN) framework will reduce complexity and improve performance by decoupling control from underlying hardware and assigning it to a centralized software-based controller.

This chapter covers the following key topics:

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Overview: This section discusses the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and also discusses ACI automation and policy-driven application profiles, software flexibility, and hardware performance scalability.

Cisco ACI Initial Setup, Fabric Discovery, Fabric Upgrade and Fabric Access Policies: This section discusses ACI spine and leaf switch discovery, and ACI fabric upgrade process.

Cisco ACI Fabric Building Blocks, Policy Model and VMM domains: This section discusses the ACI fabric building blocks and traffic flow, focusing on east-west data center traffic. You will learn how ACI tenants manage applications, networking, and how servers include separation of duties by domain owner. It also discusses how the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) supports integration with a multi-vendor hypervisors and provides configuration examples.

“Do I Know This Already?” Quiz

The “Do I Know This Already?” quiz enables you to assess whether you should read this entire chapter thoroughly or jump to the “Exam Preparation Tasks” section. If you are in doubt about your answers to these questions or your own assessment of your knowledge of the topics, read the entire chapter. Table 4-1 lists the major headings in this chapter and their corresponding “Do I Know This Already?” quiz questions. You can find the answers in Appendix A, “Answers to the ‘Do I Know This Already?’ Quizzes.”