Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Simulator Download UPD
Donnie Ehlen
The intent of the ACI Simulator is to provide real, fully-featured APIC controller software, along with a simulated fabric infrastructure of leaf switches and spine switches in one virtual machine. Because the ACI Simulator includes APICs with real production software, you can use it to understand features, exercise APIs, and initiate integration with third-party orchestration systems and applications. The native GUI and CLI of the APIC use the same APIs that are published to third parties.
If you wondered how it is going to help you, think of it as a self-contained environment with Cisco APIC instances with real production software. You can use it to quickly understand ACI features, exercise APIs, and initiate integration with third-party orchestration systems and applications. The ACI simulator will also allow you to use the native command line CLI and GUI via APIs that are available for third-parties. If you are a developer or Cisco partner, this is an ideal way to develop and test your solution. If you are a customer, you can use this in your test lab to create profiles for your enterprise apps with your actual application delivery controllers and security devices. This belongs in any well-architected DevOps environment.
The Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is conceptualized as a distributed, scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure with external endpoint connectivity that is controlled and grouped through application centric policies. The Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) is the key architectural component that is the unified point of automation, management, monitoring, and programmability for the Cisco ACI. The Cisco APIC supports the deployment, management and monitoring of any application anywhere, with a unified operations model for physical and virtual components of the infrastructure. The Cisco APIC programmatically automates network provisioning and control based on the application requirements and policies. It is the central control engine for the broader cloud network, simplifying management while allowing tremendous flexibility in how application networks are defined and automated and also providing northbound REST APIs. The Cisco APIC is a distributed system implemented as a cluster of many controller instances.This document provides the compatibility information, usage guidelines, and the scale values that were validated in testing this Cisco ACI Simulator appliance release. Use this document in combination with the documents listed in the Related Documentation section.Note: The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance server is no longer for sale after June 20, 2019, as noted here. For recent and future releases, you can download the Cisco ACI Simulator VM, an OVA file that can be installed in a virtual machine (VM) on any server that meets the installation requirements.The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance 6.0(2) release contains the same functionality as the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) 6.0(2) release. For information about the functionality, see the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Release Notes, Release 6.0(2). For more information about this product, see "Related Content."DateDescriptionMarch 1, 2023Release 6.0(2h) became available.
The intent of the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance is to provide real, fully-featured Cisco APIC software, along with a simulated fabric infrastructure of leaf switches and spine switches in one physical server. You can use the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance to understand features, exercise APIs, and initiate integration with third-party orchestration systems and applications. The native GUI and CLI of the Cisco APIC use the same APIs that are published to third parties.The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance includes simulated switches, so you cannot validate a data path. However, some of the simulated switch ports have been mapped to the front-panel server ports, which allows you to connect external management entities such as ESX servers, v Centers, v Shields, bare metal servers, Layer 4 to Layer 7 services, AAA systems, and other physical or virtual service appliances. In addition, the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance allows simulation of faults and alerts to facilitate testing and demonstrate features.One instance of the production Cisco APIC will be shipped per server appliance. By contrast, the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance includes three actual Cisco APIC instances and two simulated leaf switches and two simulated spine switches in a single server. As a result, the performance of the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance will be slower than deployments on actual hardware. You can perform operations on the simulated fabric using any of the following functional interfaces:
- Graphical user interface (GUI)
- Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Application programming interface (API)
This section lists the key software features of the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance that are available in this release.
- Application centric network policies
- Data model-based declarative provisioning
- Application, topology monitoring, and troubleshooting
- Third-party integration (Layer 4 to Layer 7 services, WAN, v Center, v Shield)
- Physical infrastructure policies (spine and leaf)
- Cisco ACI inventory and configuration
- Implementation on a distributed framework across a cluster of appliances
- Health Scores for key Managed Objects (tenants, application profiles, switches, and so on)
- Fault, event and performance management
Observe the following guidelines when using this software release:
- The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance software cannot be installed separately on a standard Cisco UCS C220 Server or on other servers. The software runs only on the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance server, which has the following PID:
- APIC-SIM-S2 (based on Cisco UCS C220 M4 server)
- The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance GUI includes an online version of the Quick Start guide that includes video demonstrations.
- Do not do change the following:
- Default names in the initial setup for node names and the cluster configuration.
- Cluster size and the number of Cisco APIC nodes.
- Infra VLAN.
- The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance does not support the following:
- Configuration of a DHCP server policy.
- Configuration of a DNS service policy.
- Configuring out-of-band management access for switches.
- Data path forwarding (the Cisco ACI Simulator appliance includes simulated switches.
- CDP is not supported between a leaf and an ESX/hypervisor or between a leaf and an unmanaged/L2 switch. Only LLDP is supported in these cases.
- The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance uses NAT for inland management. Inland IPs configured by policy are not used. Instead, Cisco APIC and node inband IPs are internally allocated.
- Cisco APIC out-of-band management IP/Gateway cannot be modified using an out-of-band management policy and can be configured only during the Cisco APIC first time setup screen.
- Keep the motion PNIC outside of the Simulator network.
- The infrastructure EPG in the Infra tenant is for internal use only.
- The MP-BGP route reflector and the OSPF external routed network protocols do not work if you are using the simulator
- Virtual shell (VSH) and isohel commands do not work on switches. These commands are implemented on the Cisco NX-OS software, and the Cisco NX-OS software is not available on the simulator.
- The MP-BGP route reflector and the OSPF external routed network protocols do not work if you are using the simulator.
- Virtual shell (VSH) and isohel commands do not work on switches. These commands are implemented on the Cisco NX-OS software, and the Cisco NX-OS software is not available on the simulator.
- Statistics are simulated. As a result, threshold crossing alert (TCA) faults are generated in the simulator to demonstrate the fault generation on the statistics threshold crossing.
- Create a syslog and Call Home source policy under common policy. This policy applies at the system level and sends all syslog and Call Home messages system wide. The GUI path to create syslog and Call Home under common policy are as follows: Admin / External Data Collector/ Monitoring Destinations / [Calomel SNMP Syslog].
- The Cisco ACI Simulator appliance simulates faults for counters, which might cause the health score of the top-of-rack (TOR) switch to go down. The faults look similar to the following example:
These specific developmental efforts are designed to make the constructive simulator easier to use by providing predefined platform and application models for each military service. In addition, Cyber TASE will expand the predefined attack and vulnerability model libraries and ease the process of creating new models.
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