Cisco ACI 4 Day Field Engineer Course

Description:

This intensive 4-day Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) course will guide students through the key concepts behind Software Defined Networking in the Data Center and the positioning of ACI up through advanced ACI topics. Through a combination of lecture and hands-on labs configuring ACI policy-based architecture, students will learn the configuration and uses of access and fabric policies, tenants, application network profiles, contracts, endpoints, VMM integration and how to connect the ACI fabric to external Layer-2 and Layer-3 networks, migration scenarios, ERSPAN, transit routing, service graphs, micro-segmentation, multi-fabric topologies and designs and recommended ACI best practices. ACI programmability methods including APIs, REST, Postman, Python and Ansible are discussed in depth on day 4 to introduce students to more efficient methods of deploying and maintaining an ACI fabric.

The course will include intense hands-on labs on real physical hardware of all the key functions necessary to bring up a working ACI fabric. Students will be provided with their own ACI Tenant, vCenter Server, ESXi Hosts and numerous virtual machines on which to work. Students will be provided with their own ACI APIC simulator for the programmability topics

Pre-requisites: None

Target Audience

This course is designed for network and data center and cloud systems architects, server administrators, application developers and security engineers as well as virtualization administrators, network architects, systems engineers and field engineers who are selling, implementing and/or managing Cisco ACI solutions.

Agenda

DAY 1

Instruction:

Module 1: ACI Overview
Module 2: ACI Switching Hardware
Module 3: Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
Module 4: APIC Fabric Discovery and Configuration
Module 5: ACI Polices and Resource Pools
Module 6: ACI Tenant Logical Polices

Labs:

Lab 1: Initial Configuration of ACI Polices and Pools
Lab 2: Configuring ACI Tenant and Access polices

DAY 2

Instruction:

Module 7: Fabric Operations and Forwarding
Module 8: Hypervisor Integration with ACI
Module 9: Routing with ACI

Labs:

Lab 3: Configure VMM and Validate End Point Learning
Lab 4: Communication Using Contracts
Lab 5: Routing Outside of ACI
Lab 6: Advanced Contract Communications

DAY 3

Instruction:

Module 10: Application Centric vs. Network Centric Design
Module 11: Extending Layer
Module 12: L4-L7 Devices
Module 13: Microsegmentation, Security and Analytics
Module 14: Multi-Fabric, Multi-Pod, Multi-Site, Remote Leaf & Virtual Pod Topologies