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

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.