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Cisco Network Dashboard Orchestrator for ACI Lab v1

Date
August 2021

The Data Center Practice is pleased to announce that Cisco Network Dashboard Orchestrator for ACI Lab v1 is available on dCloud to Cisco and Partner users in all dCloud locations.

As the newest advance in the Cisco ACI methods to interconnect networks, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator is an architectural approach for interconnecting and managing multiple sites, each serving as a single fabric and availability zone. As shown in the diagram, the Multi-Site architecture has three main functional components:

  • Two or more ACI fabrics built with Nexus 9000 switches deployed as leaf and spine nodes.
  • One APIC cluster domain in each fabric.
  • An inter-site policy manager, named Cisco ACI Multi-Site, which is used to manage the different fabrics and to define inter-site policies.

Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator has the following benefits:

  • Complementary with Cisco APIC, in Multi-Site each site is an availability zone (APIC cluster domain), which can be configured to be a shared or isolated change-control zone.
  • MP-BGP EVPN is used as the control plane between sites, with data-plane VXLAN encapsulation across sites.
  • The Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator solution enables extending the policy domain end-to-end across fabrics. You can create policies in the Multi-Site GUI and push them to all sites or selected sites. Alternatively, you can import tenants and their policies from a single site and deploy them on other sites.
  • Multi-Site enables a global view of site health.
  • From the GUI of the Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, you can launch site APICs.
  • Cross-site namespace normalization is performed by the connecting spine switches. This function requires Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches with EX on the end of the name, or newer.
  • Disaster recovery scenarios offering IP mobility across sites is one of the typical Multi-Site use cases.4.2(3l)

In this lab, setup and manage two ACI fabrics in different sites, and create a new tenant and application profile with components distributed across the ACI fabrics. Take over the management of an existing tenant from APIC and push components out to another location.

Scenarios

  • Create New Users and Sites
  • Day-0 Infrastructure Configuration
  • Creating a MSC Tenant
  • ACI Multi-Site Use Cases

Resources

View the demo https://dcloud-cms.cisco.com/demo/nexus-dashboard-orchestrator-for-aci-lab

Visit the Cisco dCloud Help page for more information and training materials

To view all available Cisco dCloud demos, visit dcloud.cisco.com 

Talk about it on the dCloud Community