1) What is the Role of IS-IS and MP-BPG under Cisco ACI Fabric in terms of routing and packetflow ?
The role of MP-BGP is to distribute routing information through the domain to each of the leaf switches that require that information. This is also needed to allow distribution of external routes in the fabric. By default, MP-BGP is actually not enabled by default in the fabric. It order to actually turn this on you need to assign a BGP AS number and also configure the spines as BGP route reflectors. Once this is done, the APIC is what configures the leafs as route-reflector clients.
IS-IS is a routing protocol that is used between the leaf and spine switches. It is what is actually building the routing table between the VTEPS. All the convergence happens independently of the APIC.
2) Can we configure F5 LB ( LTM/APM/ASM ) completely through Device package or do we need
iapps . if yes,Please mention if its ready to be deployed in production environment.
I believe you need to install an F5 device package but I would have to get back to you on this. In the mean time, here is an ACI integration demo integrating an F5 LB and a link that could be helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nw2vtid7Zs
https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/under-the-hood-of-f5-big-ip-ltm-and-cisco-aci-integration-role-of-the-device-package
3) What is Static Path Binding in ACI.
A static binding is when you use a specific path on specific ports to connect to an external device. This can be configured as a bridged or routed interface. The static path will be associated with an EPG which will also have an encapsulation VLAN set that must be part of the static VLAN pool you set. When you deploy a static path you will also configure it to whether its trunking, untagged, or 802.1p.
4) What is the difference between enable flooding / unknown unicast /Unicast routing under Bridge domain
Please look under the bridge domain and subnets tabs to see the difference between the difference types of bridge domain packet behavior. But flooding is disabled by default inside the fabric but can be enabled if desired.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/aci-fundamentals/b_ACI-Fundamentals/b_ACI-Fundamentals_chapter_010001.html
5) Do we need OOB for APIC devices only ( spine & leaf ) and can the same /16 shall be used for NoN - APIC devices for OOB management.
Out of band management is used for the nodes and APICs in your fabric. The APIC and fabric switches have dedicated physical interfaces in order to provide management communication. During the initial setup of the APIC via CIMC you will assign a TEP address pool usually with a /16 address. This is your tunnel end point and is used for VXLAN traffic and is needed to send traffic over VXLAN. This is different from OOB. The actual node management addresses are separate and are going to be your OOB management IPs which are applied to the interface eth0 (mgmt0). These will be the IP addresses assigned to your APICs and each node you configure.
6) What is the purpose of default three Tenants ( Infra/Mgmt.,etc) in APIC
There are three default tenants in ACI: Common, Infra, Management:
Common - contains policies that govern operations of resources that are accessible to all the tenants (ex. firewalls, load balancers)
Infra - contains polices that handle the operations of the infrastructure space such as the fabric VXLAN overlay
Management - contains polices that are used for management configurations used for in-band and and out-of-band configuration of the fabric nodes. It has a private OOB address space for APIC and fabric internal communications that are outside of the fabric path. This is what I referred to earlier with access to the management port to the switches.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Michael G
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