cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
343
Views
0
Helpful
1
Replies

Issues with first ACI deployment

mozorowsky
Level 1
Level 1

Good afternoon,

I'm having a heck of a time standing up ACI for the first time. I began with Multipod back to back on version 5.2 and got pod 1 and pod2 up, then I put a switch in the middle and couldn't get pod2 to come up.

Someone advised to make this work the spines have to connect directly to each other, so I then decide to switch to IPN. I removed and defaulted all of POD2, and took 2 fortigate firewalls, setup OSPF adjacency between them, connected a switch to the "LAN" interface on vlan 4 with MTU 9150, and was trying to setup IPN this way through various cisco docs I googled, and wasn't getting anywhere so then reading further it almost sounds like my understanding of IPN is wrong, and you don't route from pod 1 to FW1 to FW2 to pod2, but you have to do L2 between POD1 and POD2 and then they do the routing between each other via multicast transmission?

Can anyone please share any docs/videos/guidance on how I can understand how I'm supposed to be setting up my IPN? I will have POD1 in Ohio and POD2 in Chicago connected together via 2x 10g wave links in a port channel. Just need some help getting my head right on how this works so I can build it in the right direction.

1 Reply 1

Robert Burns
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

For back-to-back spine connections, needs to be direct as you probably found out.  Reason is that LLDP adjacencies are needed to establish peering.

For the IPN (recommended) deployment, the IPN device needs to support some key features:

  • OSPF 
  • Sub Interfaces
  • Jumbo MTU
  • PIM BiDir
  • DHCP Relay

There's lots of detailed videos and docs on setting this up.   OSPF (most common) or BGP must be used between the Spines and IPN, between IPN devices (if multiple) you can use any IP transport.  Many videos cover setting this up, but I suspect you're running into issues trying to use a FW as your IPN, just have to ensure its configured for all the necesssary features listed above.  I suggest you start with the following references:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-739714.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWxGQ6hX6o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9_lpG6WpKw 

https://haystacknetworks.com/cisco-aci-multi-pod-ipn-inter-pod-network-configuration-verification

Regards,

Robert

Getting Started

Find answers to your questions by entering keywords or phrases in the Search bar above. New here? Use these resources to familiarize yourself with the community:

Save 25% on Day-2 Operations Add-On License