Cisco ACI’s Multi-Hypervisor + BareMetal Interop with VLAN and VXLAN Routing and Bridging Demonstration

In November last year, I introduced via my blog, the powerful capabilities of the ACI Fabric and the unique hardware based VXLAN implementation in Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switching platform. In this blog, I am happy to present a powerful Video based demonstration of the ACI Fabric. The demo presents a single view of an entire spine-leaf fabric based deployment, and how the fabric allows full integration and full normalization of any encapsulation be it vlan or vxlan, with full bridging/routing capabilities across all of these including bare-metal servers. The demo also shows how data can jump in and out of physical/virtual environment within the Fabric, and how the Fabric treats everything with a consistent policy based approach to deploying apps on top of ACI. Check out the demo here:

https://youtu.be/hz7zwd98rn4

Here is an excerpt of the demo. A simple topology comprising a single Spine and three leaves sets up the demo environment. The application comprises a web tier, an app-tier and a DB tier forming a 3-tier application environment. The demo shows that ACI’s multi-hypervisor and bare metal server support lets customers mix and match servers running ESX, Hyper-V, or bare metal server components of applications with complete integration and visibility with VMware’s vCenter and Microsoft’s SCVMM virtual machine managers.  The demo also places the VMs with different virtual switching infrastructures across hypervisors to show application deployment does not need to care about what VLAN or subnet a server or virtual machine is part of since ACI normalizes all of them and connects them according to the policy.

The demo illustrates the power of the ACI Policy model via a simple Ping test, in which the policies are configured as contracts and enforced across the application tiers. The demo illustrates how policies enable connectivity between an end-point in the Web-Tier and an end-point in the App-tier, but connectivity is disallowed between the web-tier and the DB-tier.  Beautifully simple to define, automate and deploy

In closing, I want to bring to your attention, that our ACI engineers will be present at the Open Network User Group (ONUG), New York this week, Please stop by and our ACI experts will be happy to walk you through this demo in action. Stay tuned for more discussions in our blogging forum.