Preface
Welcome to the Cisco ACI cookbook! Through a series of easy-to-follow recipes, you will learn how ACI can solve a number of data-center challenges and how to create tenants, implement policies, integrate virtualization technologies, perform routing, secure your ACI Fabric, and troubleshoot and monitor it.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding Components and the ACI Fabric, covers the issues that ACI can overcome and the building blocks of the ACI fabric and walks you through the interface of the controller.
Chapter 2, Configuring Policies and Tenants, begins our journey of creating an environment for our tenants and applying policies to them.
Chapter 3, Hypervisor Integration (and Other Third Parties), builds on the foundation of our fabric and extends it, using VMWare and third-party devices.
Chapter 4, Routing in ACI, shows how we will unleash our ACI fabric to the rest of the network using IPv4, IPv6, and multicast.
Chapter 5, ACI Security, secures our fabric by implementing centralized role-based security.
Chapter 6, Implementing Quality of Service in ACI, walks us through prioritizing our traffic through the fabric.
Chapter 7, Network Programmability with ACI, explores the ways in which we can control our fabric through APIs.
Chapter 8, Monitoring ACI, shows us how to stay on top of any issues as they arise.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting ACI, walks us through a bottom-up troubleshooting approach.
Chapter 10, An End-to-End Example Using the NX-OS CLI, brings everything we have covered into one complete scenario.
What you need for this book
All you need is a computer with Internet access, some time, and some coffee.
The majority of the recipes in this book can be performed using the free Cisco Devnet sandboxes, which are browser based.
Who this book is for
This book is meant for network engineers looking to learn about ACI.
A basic understanding of routing protocols, SNMP, and NetFlow is recommended.
Sections
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
Getting ready
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
How to do it…
This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.
How it works…
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
There's more…
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
See also
This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create a new user for JIRA in the database and grant the user access to the jiradb database we just created using the following command:"
A block of code is set as follows:
<Contextpath="/jira"docBase="${catalina.home}
/atlassian- jira" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mysql -u root -pNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
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Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/CiscoACICookbook_ColorImages.pdf.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.
