Cisco ACI maximums

[rockzhou1981]

Hi There,

Could anyone help me find out the maximum tenants can setup in Cisco ACI. 

My understanding is it can support 64k tenants base on document below. however someone said it only support 100 tenants and it will grow to 500 in the future. Could anyone help to find more info. many thanks.  

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/aci-fundamentals/b_ACI-Fundamentals/b_ACI_Fundamentals_BigBook_chapter_0100.html

[Robert Burns · Accepted solution]

As of the current software release (1.0(3)), ACI supports a max of 100 tenants.  This is what has been tried & tested by QA.  In future releases this number will most likely grow.  To date we haven't seen many customers have a design requirement requiring greater than 100 tenants in a single fabric.  The scalability limitations of ACI are very flexible.  The resource limits we currently support currently reflect the recommended deployments.

If you have a particular use case for more than 100 tenants, let your account team know and we can relay your request into engineering to increase this limit in a future release (tested by QA and covered under support).

Regards,

Robert

[rockzhou1981]

Thanks Robert,

Thanks for clarify I have manage to found the  verified scalability guide during the weekend as well. to be honest I am a bit disappointed by the limitation of the scalability. We will have a discussion with our account team to see what we can do.

Thanks,

Lei 

[jowett_chris]

Hi 

"if you have a particular use case for more than 100 tenants"

Yes i would say cloud environments, each tenant would be a cloud customer, 100 tenants seems fairly weak?

thanks

[tienbuiminh]

I have the same problem with you. :(

[rockzhou1981]

100 Tenants just too little for Cloud services provider like us. We have to abandon the project just because this limitation. I hope Cisco can step up on this as the ACI concept is great. : (  

[tienbuiminh]

With one large project, we need a lot of tenant, I intend to integrate ACI with OpenStack. If the tenant < 30k, my project will fail.

[jowett_chris]

You would have to use EPG to section out customers and probably share VRFs in ACI. Your contracts would need to be spot on though due to security. I did a design a month a ago around this however it got massively complicated.

I personally think this is a temp limit, the next release code will see OSPF move away from NSSA and possible EBGP, so i fully expect Cisco to increase these limits as its only software limitation i am led to believe.

[dpita · Accepted solution]

Hello

To compliment what Robert mentioned, here is the verified scalability guide for version 3f

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/verified-scalability/b_Verified_Scalability_Limits_1_0_3x.html