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Renaming of objects in ACI

Hi, 

We are currently in the progress of setting up an Cisco ACI environment.

As this is quite new technology we came to the conclusion some objects have to be renamed.

However, a rename feature is not availiable in ACI.

So it is about deleting and recreation of XML objects.

This results in the issue of possible disconnect to the fabric from our management stations because objects are used in the Fabric but also in the Tenants.

For example VPC's or AEP's.

We've made static bindings to VPC's on our EPG's. So when we would recreate a VPC we would then have to search for all EPG's using this VPC and then delete / recreate the configuration.

This is quite a risky hassle ...

What would be a nice way to rename objects used in both Fabric as Tenant configuration ?

Best regards, 

Sebas

4 Replies 4

Tomas de Leon
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Sebas,

This is a question that comes up frequently. For most objects, they can not be renamed. Since the object DN is used thoughout the ACI Architecture to uniquely identify objects in the system.  Changing the name of an object may cause issues where this name may be referenced elsewhere in the ACI Fabric configuration.  So, the object needs to be removed and re-created with new name.

If removing objects to rename objects make sure that you export your configuration "prior" to any changes.  Schedule a maintenance window to make the changes.  Make the desired changes and then verify configuration is working after the change.

Cheers!


T.

For this reason the alias and tag options were provided.  The only refrence to these options that really covers them is in the REST API doc:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/api/rest/b_APIC_RESTful_API_User_Guide/b_IFC_RESTful_API_User_Guide_chapter_01.html#concept_08273679D10D4397AE720988C45AC89E

Here is ther relevant info from that documentation:

Object Naming

You can identify a specific object by its distinguished name (DN) or by its relative name (RN).


Note


You cannot rename an existing object. To simplify references to an object or group of objects, you can assign an alias or a tag.

Thanks for the answers.

So if we want to rename the Attachable Entity Profile used for the APIC connectivity, this would not work ? As the APIC is needed to apply the configuration to the fabric.

How would you solve that ?

I can image some function within the APIC which searches for a specific string in the configuration to rename it every where in the configuration. Allthough it would be a bit spartan :)

Hi Sebastian,

You should not need to use an Attachable Entity Profile for APIC connectivity. The vPC between APICs and leafs is brought up automatically and doesn't require user configuration.

If you wanted to do something like what you mentioned, you could write a script to delete the associations to an object, delete the object, create a new object with the new name, then create the new associations. However if you are doing that with static paths and vPCs for example, there will be some down time associated with it. So you would need to take your specific network configuration into account when designing a script to "rename" objects.

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