Adding FEX Static Ports to Cisco ACI with Cobra SDK (Network-Centric Approach)

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 these migrations every one of the ports was configured identically and as a trunk.

I created a .txt file that I could read from for the VLANs that needed to get added to the trunk. You can create your own with a "show vlan b | i active" on an existing 5k/7k that you are migrating from. I will include an example of what that looks like after the script.

OK, now lets really get going. Lets talk about how you could possibly start migrating FEXs to ACI.

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 7k-5k-2k deployment today.

Read more HERE

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 these migrations every one of the ports was configured identically and as a trunk.

I created a .txt file that I could read from for the vlans that needed to get added to the trunk. You can create your own with a "show vlan b | i active" on an existing 5k/7k that you are migrating from. I will include an example of what that looks like after the script.

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