Over the last two years or so, I have been on adventure with Data Centre Infrastructure renewal. As past posts may allude to, ACI was a big part of what we did, but before anyone gets all dogmatic about it, know that we didn’t go “All in” with that one product, since I personally don’t subscribe to the “DC Fabrics cure all ills” mantra. CLOS fabrics and the various approaches to overlays within them are great at providing stable platforms with predictable properties for speed, latency and scale.

So I bought my ACI bundles so long ago that they’re still running 1.0(3f). Right now mainline is 1.2(1k), so i’m a bit behind. Using the official Cisco doc I did the first staged upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 using the Web GUI. I wanted to see what happened in a visual sense. Basically you setup a connection between the APIC and a host that has staged the firmware files, then you setup a policy defining what versions the fabric should be on, and when that should be made active.

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.

Ick, I know. Python has long been the language of choice for engineers looking to make their day go that little bit quicker or easier. With deepening skill levels, more and more complex repetitive tasks can be disected and segmented into functions and reuable code, such that a competent scripting engineer can go from blank page to automated process in a matter of hours in most cases. It is for this reason that I sit here to write this - an advocacy for ALL Cisco engineers to down tools and spend however long you need to get good at this.