- What is the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module (APIC-EM)?
- Is the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module a hardware device or software application?
- What equipment is required to install the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module – are there any special specs?
- What applications will be supported in the first release of APIC-EM?
- What types of North bound APIs does the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module support to interact with the application layer, such as customer applications, services and policy engines?
- What all network devices does APIC-EM support?
- What is the data format used to send/receive data when making REST calls for APIC-EM?
- What are the APIC-EM supported programming languages?
- Where can we find a documentation for APIC-EM's RESTful API?
- What are APIC-EM REST APIs supported methods?
- Is there a limit for the number of entries returned by a GET API?
- Is there any sample code of using REST API?
- How many nodes can the APIC-EM controller manage?
- What languages can I use to develop an application that calls the APIC-EM REST API?
- Does APIC-EM support High-Availability installations?
- What’s RBAC?
- Do I need a service ticket?
Q1. What is the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module (APIC-EM)?
A. With the advent of SDN driven network programmability and abstraction, IT operations management is poised for a transformation to higher levels of agility and automation. The Cisco Application Infrastructure Policy Controller (APIC) Enterprise Module platform extends Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to the WAN and access edge. The APIC-EM shifts conventional configuration based network management to a new policy based management paradigm, enabling new end to end IT solutions for services such as Network Security, Unified Communications, WAN Automation and Smart Troubleshooting. The controller offers customers a low-risk, evolutionary approach to adopting software-defined networking (SDN) technologies in their branch and campus environments.
Q2. Is the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module a hardware device or software application?
A. The Cisco APIC-EM GA release will be available as an ISO image download and as an APIC-EM Physical Appliance.
Q3. What equipment is required to install the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module – are there any special specs?
A. Cisco UCS is the only supported hardware in GA.
Q4. What applications will be supported in the first release of APIC-EM?
A. The Cisco APIC-EM GA Release will support the Inventory, Discovery, Topology, Path Visualization, NG-PnP and IWAN Applications.
Q5. What types of North bound APIs does the Cisco APIC Enterprise Module support to interact with the application layer, such as customer applications, services and policy engines?
A. APIC-EM supports the Representational State Transfer (REST) format to make API calls.
Q6. What all network devices does APIC-EM support?
A. APIC-EM PLATFORM SUPPORT:
| Minimum OS | APIC-EM Base | Path Trace | QOS |
Switches | | | |
3750-X | - 15.2(1)E1, 12.2(55)SE8
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3560-X | - 15.2(1)E1, 12.2(58)SE2
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
2960-X | - 15.2.3E, 15.0.2-EX5
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
2960-S | - 15.2(1)E1, 12.2(58)SE2
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
6500(Sup720-3C/B) | - 15.1(2)SY2
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
6500(2T) | - 15.1(2)SY2, 15.0(1)SY6
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
6880-X | - 15.1(2)SY2
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
4500(Sup7E) | - 3.5(2)E, 3.2(8)SG
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
4500E(Sup8E) | - 3.3.2XO, 3.6.1E
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3560CG | - 15.0(2)SE5, 12.2(55)EX3
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3850(Switch) | - 3.3.2SE, 3.2.3SE
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3850-Stack | - 3.3.2SE, 3.2.3SE
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3750x-Stack | - 15.2(1)E1, 12.2(55)SE8
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
2960S-Stack | - 15.2(1)E1, 12.2(58)SE2
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
3650 | - 3.3.2SE, 3.2.3SE
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Nexus 7k | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Nexus 5k | | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Routers | | | |
ISR-G2 | - 15.2(4)M5, 15.1(4)M7
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
ASR1K | - 3.11(2)S
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
ASR9K | - 5.1.3
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
ISR4451 | - 3.12.0S
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
WLCs | | | | |
2500 | - 7.6(110.0), 7.4(121.0)
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
5500 | - 7.6(110.0), 7.4(121.0)
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
8500 | - 7.6(110.0), 7.4(121.0)
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
WiSM2 | - 7.6(110.0), 7.4(121.0)
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
5760 | - 3.3.3SE
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Enhanced EtherSwitch service modules | | | | |
Cisco 2900(SM-ES2-16-P, SM-ES2-24-P, SM-D-ES2-48) | - 15.0(2)SE8, 12.2(55)SE10
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Cisco 3900(SM-ES3-16-P, SM-ES3-24-P, SM-D-ES3-48-P) | Cisco IOS 15.0(2)SE8, 12.2(55)SE10 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Q7. What is the data format used to send/receive data when making REST calls for APIC-EM?
A. Javascript Object Notation (JSON) is used to pass parameters when making API calls and is also the returned data format.
Q8. What are the APIC-EM supported programming languages?
A. Representational State Transfer (REST) is the protocol used to communicate with the APIC-EM server. Any programming language that supports HTTP/HTTPS calls can be used to make REST calls.
Q9. Where can we find a documentation for APIC-EM's RESTful API?
A. The API reference comes with the installation package. Once you have APIC-EM running you can access the reference documentation from the User Interface.
You can also view the reference doc from Cisco DevNet
https://developer.cisco.com/site/apic-em/documents/api-reference/
Q10. What are APIC-EM REST APIs supported methods?
A. Four methods are Supported methods: POST, PUT, DELETE, GET.
Q11. Is there a limit for the number of entries returned by a GET API?
A. The maximum number of entries returned by a GET API is 500 (default)
Q12. Is there any sample code of using REST API?
A. There are some Python samples on Cisco DevNet Learning Labs.
https://learninglabs.cisco.com/labs/tags/coding
https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/apicem-ll-sample-code
Note: This is EFT2 code
Q13. How many nodes can the APIC-EM controller manage?
A. The Cisco APIC-EM GA Release will support the following scale limits:
Network Devices (Switches, Routers, WLC): 2000
Wireless Access Points: 2000
Hosts/End points: 20000
Q14. What languages can I use to develop an application that calls the APIC-EM REST API?
A. You can use any language that provides a HTTP(S) aware library; such libraries are available for most common high-level programming languages. These libraries provide wrappers that enable you to issue REST API calls from your native programming environment, parse the result that the server returns, and make that result available in the native programming environment.
Q15. Does APIC-EM support High-Availability installations?
A. Right now, all APIC-EM controllers are resilient, which means that if a feature of the controller becomes unavailable, a new instance of that feature is instantiated automatically. Resilience is not instantaneous, so REST callers need to handle error codes and message timeouts appropriately to retry as necessary.
GA release will have support for hardware redundancy.
Q16. What’s RBAC?
A. Role-Based Access Controls
The RBAC mechanism utilizes security tokens that the controller issues upon successful authentication of a user of the APIC-EM controller. All subsequent requests from the authenticated user must provide a valid token.
Q17. Do I need a service ticket?
A. All REST requests must include service ticket as the value of the X-Auth-Token header except the request that generates a service ticket.
