ACI Preparation

[DamianRC]

Hello,

I have some 9504s and 93180s to install. They were ordered with NXOS. They will replace a Nexus 7K-> 5k -> 2K environment i the DC.

Later on it was decided that ACI was the way to go, so two APICs were purchased.

 - Is the ACI software that needs to be installed on the 9504 and 93180s on the APIC?

- I'm reading in ACI books and hearing in ACI training videos that a license is required to use the 2K FEXs with 93180 leaves, yet I can't find anything online to support this. Is this true?

- Can the 2Ks be dual-homed to leaves(does this even make sense)?

- If a 2K is attached to a leaf and successfully configured(pre cut-over), can it be replaced with a production FEX(cut-over) and be expected to operate normally once code is downloaded?

Looking forward to the replies.

Thank you

[6askorobogatov]

Hi, I can comment on your FEX questions (been there). 

1. Not sure if it make sense to multi-home FEX, if you have a a multihome  nodes you will connect them to two FEXs anyways. You can created VPC with 2 FEX ports and have a redundancy that way. 

2. Fabric permits to create FEX object/ uplink ports / FEX ports and assign static ports to EPG without actual FEX connected to the fabric. You will get bunch of faults "port assigned to EPG is down" but will have averything redy to move prod. FEX to the fabric with all servers attached and pre-assigned to EPG.  

basically those are the objects:

 "dn": "uni/infra/fexprof-{{FEX_NAME}}"  for FEX

 "dn": "uni/infra/accportprof-{{LEAF_NAME}}/hports-Port{{UPLINK_NUMBER}}-typ-range" for UPLINK

 "dn": "uni/infra/fexprof-{{DEV_NAME}}/hports-Port{{PORT_NUMBER}}-typ-range"  for PORT

When you connect FEX to fabric (avoid to have FEX connected one leg to old switch, another to leaf. Disconnect all uplinks first ) , FEX will get a new code reboots IIRC 2 times (all takes at list 10-15 min) and come-up on the fabric. 

You can see in the leaf  "show fex detail" .