On Friday last week we rolled out our ACI solution into one of our DCs. The setup is simple, comprising of;

2x Nexus 9336pq "Baby" Spines
4x Nexus 9396px Leaf Switches
3x APIC Controllers
2x ASA 5585x Firewalls

The compute behind it is UCS based and we have F5 LTMs in the ADC role.

Over the weekend I provisioned it. That did not go well. Today I had to go back and revisit the cabling, and then the Fabric initial setup, and then redid the entire thing from scratch again. Oops.

Starting yesterday I began to deploy our Nexus 9000 ACI solution into our Datacentre. Scary yet fun times are ahead.

Over the course of the project I will do my best to chronicle anonymised info that talks about what we did and how we did it. Some of that may be of use to another ACI hopeful, whereas some will be pretty specific to my environment. One thing I won’t be doing is reinventing the blogging wheel, and I will chose to refer to others that helped me, rather than rehash the same subjects over and over again.

This week is a first for me. I’m at Cisco Live in San Diego. It’s been pretty awesome so far I have to say!

Full Disclosure, I was brought here by Cisco to talk to Analysts about ACI. However, I should also point out my only session was closed door feedback on why we chose the solution, and how its helped us to date. Since we are only at the early stages, it was a short conversation. I thank Cisco for their hospitality, and for allowing me to access Conference Level sessions that my explorer level pass would not normally allow.

Oh how the world has changed since I started out in the wonderful trade.

We used to have VLANs and subnets; switches, routers and firewalls. People would moan things didn’t work and we did a traceroute to figure out why. We would bash out a fix, and if it broke, we would bash out another. It was the wild west, and that was fun. Cowboy hats were standard issue.

Then along came the bad guys, and with them, the policy doctors. Changes became more structured and requirements became more complex. Environments spiraled out into wider geographical areas and management became less about break fix and more about tightly structured architecture. The industry responded with protocols and toolchains, each with their own use case, and bit by bit, the sector split up into the key areas of WAN, DC and Campus.