Many people are in the situation where the company chooses to refresh the Data Center with the Cisco ACI, send their network engineers into training, and expect them to be able to operate the fabric immediately. It is almost impossible or dangerous because the gap to being fluent with ACI is too high, and the mechanisms are quite different from the CLI model to the ACI model to master them in a week. It may start from a simple VLAN to an Endpoint Group coupled to a Bridge domain, forwarding table to the data-plane learning, from a few lines of the well-known CLI commands to a dozen objects linked together to configure an access port.
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Here are a few recommended options:
ACI Mini fabric
If it is an enterprise, the best option is to have an ACI Mini Fabric in addition to the actual Fabric. The mini fabric is composed of a physical APIC (M3), two Leaf (93180YC-EX), and two Spines (C9332C).
In the case of a network engineer who doesn’t stand this chance, the best remaining options are:
Cisco DevNet Sandboxes
It has easy access to shared APIC for unlimited time or reservable APIC in limited time on limited versions of ACI. Cisco DevNet is the easiest solution to discover/practice easily and quickly Cisco ACI remotely without owning anything but the possibility of testing real case scenarios of VMM integrations or failovers.
Cisco ACI Simulator
For full-time availability, easy access on your company servers, and some privacy to test your target configurations. The Cisco ASI Simulator is a good solution for the Cisco ACI hands-on lab because it lets you touch ACI on your laptop if you have enough resources or an ESX from the enterprise. Once you install it, it is easy to test your enterprise’s target configuration of Tenant/Fabric policies as it is not shared in public.
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