Here in
this article, We are going to talk about the difference between the APIC controller
and ACI Multisite Orchestrator. As you know various models of ACI like ACI pod, ACI Multipod, ACI Stretch Fabric. Every time to deploy any of this you need to have the ACI APIC controller to manage the fabric but if the requirement to have a single console for two or more different ACI fabric which is addressed in ACI Multi-Site required ACI Multi-site Orchestrator ACI MSO.
Let's talk about both APIC and ACI MSO as below.
APIC Controllers
As many of
you know, Cisco APIC or so called Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure
Controller is one of the key component for any fabric from where the policies
will be pushed towards the network.
The APIC
appliance is a centralized, clustered controller that enhances efficiency and combines
the operation of physical and virtual environments. The controller accomplishes
and drives a scalable multitenant Cisco ACI fabric.
Below are the key features of APIC controllers in ACI infrastructure
- Central point of management and configuration for the Fabric
- Responsible for all Fabric local functions like Fabric discovery and bring up, Fabric access policies, Service graphs and Domains creation (VMM, Physical, etc.)
- Integration with third party services
- Maintains runtime data (VTEP address, VNID, Class_ID, GIPo, etc.)
- No participation in the fabric control and data planes
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Fig 1.1- Cisco ACI APIC and MSO design
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ACI Multisite Orchestrator ( ACI MSO)
When we
talk about the ACI MSO, it is called as manager of managers which can Monitoring
the health-state of the different ACI Sites. It can provide Provisioning of
day-0 configuration to establish inter-site EVPN control plane.
It also defining
and provisioning policies across sites and also Day-2 operation functionalities.
ACI MSO can handles various APIC controllers and pushed policies on all the ACI
fabrics so it is complementary to APIC controllers.
Below are the key features of ACI MSO in ACI infrastructure
- Complementary to APIC
- Provisioning and managing of “Inter-Site Tenant and Networking Policies”
- Granularly propagate policies to multiple APIC clusters
- Can import and merge configuration from different APIC cluster domains
- End-to-end visibility and troubleshooting
- No run time data, configuration repository
- No participation in the fabric control and data planes