Cisco ACI IFM and OpFlex Correlation

[newmanf]

Hello, 

I was reading about ACI fabric discovery process and want to make clear demarcation between IFM and OpFlex operations.

From book i read: "In this discovery process, a fabric node is considered active when the APIC and node can exchange heartbeats through the Intra-Fabric Messaging (IFM) process. The IFM process is also used by the APIC to push policy to the fabric leaf nodes."

I just want to understand if IFM is part of OpFlex ? or it is totally different protocol ? IFM operates only during switch discovery or heartbeats are constantly send ?

Thanks in advance,

[tuanquangnguyen]

Digging through a few ACI documents, I think that they are supposed to be different protocols. While both can be regarded as southbound protocols, IFM seems to only interact with fabric nodes (and not many documents mentioning it) and OpFlex interacts with external network environments that use OpFlex agents to integrate with ACI (AVE, OpenStack, etc.)

I have yet come across a document saying that IFM and OpFlex is the same protocol.

[Sergiu.Daniluk]

Old thread, but relevant question.

Just to avoid confusion, IFM is not the same as OpFlex.

IFM is basically the software layer that delivers messages between DMEs, both locally on APIC or between APIC and Switch (Policy Manager, Policy Element, Topology Manager, Inventory, Event manager, Debugger etc)

OpFlex is used for various integrations with external agents or orchestrators - AVE, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack.

Stay safe,

Sergiu