ACI Simulator: Leaf and spine switches not discoverable

[pv2b]

Hello!

I have installed the Cisco ACI simulator on an ESXi host in our datacenter in order to learn about ACI. I've provisioned a seperate VLAN and subnet for the purposes of this deployment.

Deploying the OVA went without a hitch, and I passed through the wizard on the console to perform the initial setup. I selected the "small topology", which is suppsosed to be 1 APIC, 1 leaf and 1 spine.

I was initially unable to reach the APIC controller's IP address, but changing the security policy on the virtual port group in vSphere to allow Forged Transmits and MAC Address Changes seems to have fixed that. (Just enabling promiscuous mode doesn't seem to have been enough.)

I was then able to log on to the APIC controller's web UI. However, I am unable to proceed to the next step, which is fabric discovery of the leaf and spine switch.

Looking under Fabric -> Fabric Membership, there are no nodes that are registered, pending registration, unreachable or unmanaged.

There are a few faults logged (see attached picture) but I'm not sure which of those faults are expected in a simulator environment, nor is it clear to me how to fix them.

One detail: The "infra VLAN" I wasn't sure what that was supposed to be for. I just entered an unused VLAN number on my side, and I'm expecting that this doesn't matter anyway because it will just be inside the "internal" environment of the simulator.

I'll be happy for any help the forum can provide on this. I'm sure you will need some more information, just let me know what you need and I'll do my best to provide it.

[kristjankristinsson · Accepted solution]

Did you try to use all defaults (except for oob mgmt and password), infra vlan (internal to simulator) set to 4?

[pv2b]

I have not tried that.

Is there any way of changing these settings without re-deploying the whole VM? (Deploying the VM took a sigificant amount of time because it's 50 GB...)

[kristjankristinsson]

Yes - every time you reboot the emulator it will reset.

So you need to make a remote destination and an export policy (backup of config) to save your settings so you can import it for next time.

[pv2b]

That's good to know, although I already (uselessly it seems) deleted the VM and am mid-deployent. Thanks for the heads up on that, that seems to be a great way to lose your progress if you're setting up a complex lab. Another way might be to take VMware snapshots (including memory.) (Edit: That might become prohibitively expensive though given how much RAM the ACI simulator uses...)

I will try with the standard settings and update on whether that helped.

[pv2b]

I can report back that setting the standard settings appears to have produced a working simulator install.

I had to re-number my "ACI simulator" network for it not to conflict with the original assignment I had made. (I had originally assigned 10.0.27.0/24 which conflicts with the 10.0.0.0/16 VTEP network.)

I suspect that it was specifically changing away from the default for the Infra VLAN ID that was the actual problem, but right now I'm happy to have a working baseline.

Thank you for your help!