Plumbing ACI is something that YouTube has you covered on. I wont reinvent that wheel. For the initial standup, I am doing the bare minimum connectivity; each leaf has one 40G uplink to each spine, meaning, 80G of North/South Bandwidth. This will double up when we are preparing for Production service, matching my UCS/FI Bandwidth between each Chassis (4x10G links to each side of my 2208XPs). My 3 APICs are configured as follows:

On Friday last week we rolled out our ACI solution into one of our DCs. The setup is simple, comprising of;

2x Nexus 9336pq "Baby" Spines
4x Nexus 9396px Leaf Switches
3x APIC Controllers
2x ASA 5585x Firewalls

The compute behind it is UCS based and we have F5 LTMs in the ADC role.

Over the weekend I provisioned it. That did not go well. Today I had to go back and revisit the cabling, and then the Fabric initial setup, and then redid the entire thing from scratch again. Oops.

Starting yesterday I began to deploy our Nexus 9000 ACI solution into our Datacentre. Scary yet fun times are ahead.

Over the course of the project I will do my best to chronicle anonymised info that talks about what we did and how we did it. Some of that may be of use to another ACI hopeful, whereas some will be pretty specific to my environment. One thing I won’t be doing is reinventing the blogging wheel, and I will chose to refer to others that helped me, rather than rehash the same subjects over and over again.

Today I was reminded what a great git of Kit the really is. Its essentially a box that gives you Serial Access to a device via an RJ45 (Cisco pin-out) using WiFi, Bluetooth or wired, using a web GUI, or a bonkers driver setup on your machine.

For me, I use the AirConsole at work in a jack of all trades way.

• I cable the Serial Dongle to the Router
• I have a WiFi client profile configured that will auto join my (pervasively configured) corporate dirty network.
• I have a WiFi AP setup in the AirConsole that securely presents a new network that I can join to access the Serial Port
• I have NAT configured on the AP->Client WiFi so that I can still access the internet from that client Laptop
• I have the Ethernet port configured to bridge with the AP interface, so I can get a wired device to connect to the Serial setup, and the internet.

So, most of the time what I find myself doing is plugging in the AirConsole, then going to a nearby desk and connecting to the AirConsole Web interface via HTTPS over the dedicated WiFi. I can then configure my box, and still access the internet.

So by now you can use SoapUI and Python to read info out, and can utilise SoapUI Test Cases to validate, and deliver changes to the CallManager system. Again, please do ensure you have reviewed parts 1-3 before entering into this post. Its entirely contextualised within the series.

Up until now what we have been doing is quite focused on a single object being added or sense checked. In this, the final post in this mini series we will be looking at an end to end python script that can be used to add a new end user to the system, with pre and post validation.