The Dietze Haus

Let's look at how to start migrating FEXs to ACI. Legacy note: This 2017 article and its sample code target Cisco ACI 2.3(1f) and the Python 2.7-era Cobra SDK. Treat it as a historical migration reference and validate object models, dependencies, and deployment steps against current Cisco documentation. Firstly, we need to discuss the basics of the application-centric approach and the network-centric approach. In the network-centric model, you can connect ACI to a legacy network that is still running significant VLANs. This is a decent strategy if you don't want to re-IP as you move to ACI and have a significant Nexus 7000/5000/2000 deployment today. Background: Cisco ACI overview Although ACI is capable of handling this type of infrastructure, it was obviously not designed to maintain a deployment this way from the GUI so we will need to compensate with a significant amount of scripting. This example was actually created to support some B22 migrations. For each of th...

We should talk about Cisco ACI and the Python Cobra SDK. The Cisco ACI Python Cobra SDK can automate common tasks that are cumbersome to repeat manually in the APIC interface. Legacy note: This 2017 introduction targets Cisco ACI 2.3(1f) and the Python 2.7-era Cobra SDK. Package installation, authentication behavior, and supported APIs may differ in current releases. Use current Cisco documentation for production implementations. I will not provide examples of how to install the Cobra SDK or any of the Python modules you need. There are plenty of other places on the internet that you can get those instructions from. Let's start with the absolute basics. Authentication is obviously the first step as we begin our discussion of Cisco ACI. I have provided a basic auth module that can be imported into any Python SDK program. It's not really all that useful, but it will be easier for me to include code later as these posts will build on each other. We should talk about Cis...