Last week I had some fun in Amsterdam, and at no point was there any debauchery.

For those who are unaware, Autocon is a conference put together by the Network Automation Forum. Autocon1 was the second event ever, and the first in Europe. They ran autocon0 in Denver in the Autumn of 2023.

TL:DR - if you are in the network automation space, you have to try and get yourself there. It’s a very valuable event.

Over the last two years or so, I have been on adventure with Data Centre Infrastructure renewal. As past posts may allude to, ACI was a big part of what we did, but before anyone gets all dogmatic about it, know that we didn’t go “All in” with that one product, since I personally don’t subscribe to the “DC Fabrics cure all ills” mantra.

CLOS fabrics and the various approaches to overlays within them are great at providing stable platforms with predictable properties for speed, latency and scale. Unsurprisingly, they go on to do a great job in server farms that can make the best use of that flexibility. During recent conversations on DC refresh, our Arista friends have been extremely keen to try and get us to run our Internet BGP border on the fabric as well. The 7280SR2K can handle 2M routes in FIB they say, just lob stuff into a VRF, bit of policy and voila. Yeah.

So I bought my ACI bundles so long ago that they’re still running 1.0(3f). Right now mainline is 1.2(1k), so i’m a bit behind.

Using the official Cisco doc I did the first staged upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 using the Web GUI. I wanted to see what happened in a visual sense.

Basically you setup a connection between the APIC and a host that has staged the firmware files, then you setup a policy defining what versions the fabric should be on, and when that should be made active. For me it was 1.1(4f) and now basically.

ACI brings with it many different constructs for operating networks, some of which have analogous equivalence with classical networking, some of which are literally bat-poop crazy.

As per usual, you can find lots of resources on how to structure ACI fabrics elsewhere, i’m not going to waste time on what you can do and focus on what I am going to do (roughly).

The below Image was unceremoniously stolen from Cisco themselves, in the critical read ACI Fundamentals

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.