Cisco 3164 Spine with not ACI infrastructure

[iboluda]

Hi,

Is it possible to use Cisco 3164 as a Spine with NXOS 9 without using ACI? I know that if we use ACI at least we have to use nexus 9000 series.

Thanks in advance

Regards

[ss1 · Accepted solution]

Dear iboluda,

This is what we were doing for 4 years. N3K-C3164Q used for spine towards N9K-C9396PX. It was working okay as a spine. We were having switchports with trunk traffic and routerports for our VXLAN underlay and I don't recall of any issues caused by the switch. 

You may want to ensure the spine is only working as a spine (i.e. only routing OSPF and PIM for the underlay) and not mixing VPC + PIM + OSPF + VTEP interface etc. I was even having VTEPs on VPC nodes which had been OSPF routers and anycast-rp's for the underlay and there were multiple issues indeed, however, as soon as I separated the spine function on different devices, all issues disappeared right away.  

[iboluda]

Thank you ss1,

We want to test an environment with Cisco N3K-C3164Q as leaf and spine so I really appreciate your answer.

Regards