Hi @fhgsit ,
IN ACI, ESXi servers are be connected to LEAVES - not spines.
In ACI, think of the spines as a very versatile piece of wire that connect leaf switches. That is pretty much their only purpose. And because of the Clos (leaf/spine) topology, the capacity of that piece of wire can be increased at will by adding more spine switches.
All the hard work in ACI is done by leaf switches. So you connect your ESXi hosts. your routers, firewalls, legacy switches network, ADCs etc to leaves. The only exception is is you connect one ACI site to another. In that case spines from one site need to be connected to the spines of the other (via an IP network, called an Inter Pod Network - IPN or an Inter-site Network - ISN)
a vPod is an extension of an Inter Pod Network in the form of a new pod at a location where at least two ESXi servers are available. ACI vPod still requires a physical ACI footprint since vPod is managed by the overall Multi-Pod APIC cluster. So if you wish to set up a vPod, your physical leaves will need to connect to an IP network (i.e. physically connect to a router) that supports the encapsulation and transport of ACI traffic to the other site (where the vPod exists connected via another router) using an MPBGP-EVPN.
In other words, you can't really connect ESXi hosts directly to the spines, although technically I guess if your ESXi host is hosting the IPN router... it may be possible(?) but I've never heard of this approach. I'm happy to be corrected if anyone can tell me they've tried this.
I'll finish with a hint - as much as I hate to promote any social media, there are some very experienced Cisco practitioners that follow the Facebook Cisco ACI Users Group. You may get a more complete answer there.
RedNectar aka Chris Welsh.
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