Call for marketing explanation

[RedNectar]

Hi experts,

I have a great deal of trouble explaining to students why when creating a Bridge Domain, selecting Optimize for the Forwarding option means the bolded options below and not the italicised options as it did when ACI first came out.

L2 Unknown Unicast:	Hardware Proxy, Flood
L3 Unknown Multicast Flooding:	Flood, Optimized Flood
Multi Destination Flooding:	Flood in BD, Drop, Optimized Flood
ARP FLooding	Enabled, Disabled

I'm afraid it is beyond my abilities to explain why the bolded options OPTIMISE anythng except maybe L2 Unknown unicast.

Can somone with Cisco marketing skills tell me how to explain what is "optimised" about these settings? I.e. Why is flooding L3 Unknown Mulicasts more optimum than "Optimized Flood" etc?

As I said - beyond my abilities at the moment. I'm really looking for inspiration here.

Note: This plea comes after two earlier attempts (this one and this one) that seemed to draw little or no response.

[joezersk]

Hi Chris.  Do I dare?  ;)

While I don't have a definitive answer, I suspect the "original" defaults were, in fact, optimized for what ACI could do way back when. 

What likely happened over time is that when adding things like MPOD, MSITE, RLEAF, etc that those defaults needed to change to increase the likelihood of things working out of the box for most deployments.  But....they just never got around to changing the word from "optimize" to something else more suitable.  I'd chalk it up to a cosmetic evolution that would be less confusing if they just called it something else. 

I should also add that engineering is very loathe to ever change a setting from its original default.  This is to avoid cases where a customer upgrades from one version with setting 'x' to a new version where setting is now 'y'... and surprise! things don't work as expected anymore. 

So, in the case of BD settings and evolving defaults... a test would show that any existing BD's settings would stay as they were at creation (i.e the old defaults)....but only newly created BDs would have the new 'optimized' defaults. 

[RedNectar]

Hi @joezersk ,

Thanks for having a go. But really the whole issue is totally cosmetic. THERE IS NO UNDERLYING MIB entry to say that a BD is "Optimised".  It is nothing more than a cosmetic macro used in the GUI to pre-configure four other options in one hit.

What makes me angry, is that the configuration of four underlying options has changed over time (for good reasons)

I can see no good reason why "they just never got around to changing the word from "optimize" to something else more suitable." as you say.

Or better still, just pre-fill some default values for the four options and remove the "Optimised forwarding" section all together - it only appears when you first create a BD, which only adds to the confustion because when you go back and look at your recently-configured BD, there is no "Optimize forwarding" item any more.

I have no access to talk to the people who actually make these decisions. My hope is that someone internal with better connections than me can actually point out politely to the designers of the GUI just how stupid the current situation is.

The fact that no developers actually read this site can be seen by the fact that I got zero responses to this post, which called out to them directly.

[Sergiu.Daniluk]

Hi @RedNectar 

I think you have better chances of getting BU attention regarding this setting in the official facebook Cisco ACI User Group 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1028679983855301 

There are a lot of BU, TAC, TME people in the group who are actively participating in discussions. 

Cheers,

Sergiu