Note: For more information about the Cisco ACI stretched-fabric deployment option, refer to the following link. Despite the use of partial mesh connectivity, functionally the stretched fabric still represents a single-pod deployment, in which a single instance of all the Cisco ACI control-plane protocols run across all the interconnected data center sites, and so creates a single failure domain. Given the common limited availability of fiber connections between those locations, the stretched fabric uses a partial mesh topology, in which some leaf nodes (called transit leaf nodes) are used to connect to both the local and remote spine nodes, and the rest of the leaf nodes connect only to the local spine nodes. The next step in the evolution of Cisco ACI geographically stretches a pod across separate physical data center locations, usually deployed in the same metropolitan area.The entire pod is under the management of a single Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) cluster, which also represents the single point of policy definition. A single instance of Cisco ACI control-plane protocols runs between all the network devices within the pod. The first option, available from Cisco ACI Release 1.0, consists of a classic leaf-and-spine two-tier fabric (a single pod) in which all the deployed leaf nodes are fully meshed with all the deployed spine nodes. įigure 1 shows the architectural options to extend connectivity and policy enforcement between different ACI networks that have been offered from the launch of Cisco ACI up to today.Ĭisco ACI connectivity options and policy domain evolution For more information, see the Cisco ACI white papers available at the following link. Note: To best understand the design presented in this document, readers should have at least a basic understanding of Cisco ACI and how it works and is designed for operation in a single site or pod. Depending on the deployment option used (and as explained in this document), these fabrics may be called pods or fabrics and sites. Business requirements (business continuance, disaster avoidance, etc.) lead to the deployment of separate data center fabrics, and these need to be interconnected with each other. With the increasing adoption of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) as a pervasive fabric technology, enterprises and service providers commonly need to interconnect separate Cisco ACI fabrics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |