using arista switch as a tor switch with scvmm

The Nexus 9000 series released by Cisco earlier this year is at the core of the new ACI platform. ACI extends the principles of the Cisco UCS service profiles to the entire network fabric. ACI is an application centric, software/policy driven, leaf-spine architecture that abstracts the logical definition of the physical hardware to provide re-usable and extensible policies for quick deployment of network infrastructure. It’s definitely my weakest area so I’ve made a commitment to myself to work on my networking knowledge and understanding as much as I can.ĪCI is the new vision for Cisco to manage their data center networks into the future. My background is not in networking but in virtualisation, compute and storage so I thought it would be a good opportunity to brush up on my networking skills at the same time. When the opportunity arose to join a test drive workshop on ACI it was too good to miss so I jumped at the chance. I’ve heard about NSX but haven’t had a chance as yet to play about with it. There’s has also been quite a bit of discussion around the competition between Cisco with it’s ACI fabric and VMware’s NSX network virtualisation software. Cisco have been really pushing ACI hard on the various media streams lately. I’ve read quite a bit about ACI recently but wasn’t able to really picture in my head what is is, how it works and what benefits if any it can provide for me. Recently I attended the Cisco Roadshow in Melbourne and was really interested in the speech by Dave Robbins around ACI.

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to be invited to an ACI Test Drive run by Firefly on behalf of Cisco.

Using arista switch as a tor switch with scvmm