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Introduction to ACI Multi-Site Fabric Design Network

In my earlier post I talk about the ACI stretched Fabric and ACI multi-pod fabric designs with single and multiple APIC clusters. Now I am going to talk about the basics of the Cisco ACI Multi-site fabric design network in my article. If you want to have a look for my earlier article, please go through the below mentioned link and review before we will start with the Cisco ACI multi-site fabric network design.

So in short, you now understand the Cisco single-pod, Cisco ACI stretched fabric and Cisco ACI multi-pod fabric design. Now we are going to talk about the next level of Cisco ACI deployment model and this model is called as Cisco ACI Multi-site fabric design.

Cisco ACI Multi-site Fabric Network Design 
Making more innovation in the Cisco ACI with the APIC 2.0 release, Cisco said that a Multi-Site design is the architecture interconnecting multiple APIC cluster domains with their associated pods. 

A Multi-Site design could also be called a Multi-Fabric design, because it interconnects separate availability zones (fabrics), each deployed either as a single pod or multiple pods (a Multi-Pod design). Below is an network basic topology showing the Cisco ACI multi-site fabric design.

Fig 1.1- Cisco ACI Multi-site Fabric Design Topology
What is the hardware requirements of have Cisco ACI Multi-site ?
Well if you are going to deploy the Cisco ACI Multi-site deployment in your network you should have the below hardware requirements.
  • Two or more ACI fabrics built with Nexus 9000 switches deployed as leaf and spine nodes. 
  • One APIC cluster domain in each fabric. 
  • An inter-site policy manager, named Cisco ACI Multi-Site, which is used to manage the different fabrics and to define inter-site policies.
What will be the Control and Data plane protocols used in the Cisco ACI Multi-site fabric designs ?

The basic is use of the MP-BGP EVPN as the control plane between sites and you are using the data-plane on VXLAN encapsulation across sites. This deployment or solution extending the policy domain end-to-end across fabrics. You can create policies in the Multi-Site GUI and push them to all sites or selected sites.

What are the major deployments requirements of Cisco ACI multi-site where we can use it ?
The question relates to the use case of the Cisco ACI multi-site fabric or you can say which requirements will have the solution of Cisco ACI Multi-site fabric solutions. 

Cisco put some of the use case for this while they are adding many features or use case in their next releases. Below are the use cases for the Cisco ACI multi-site fabric solution
  • Stretched Bridge Domain with Layer 2 Broadcast Extension
  • Stretched Bridge Domain with No Layer 2 Broadcast Extension
  • Stretched EPG Across Sites
  • Stretched VRF with Inter-Site Contracts
  • Shared Services with Stretched Provider EPG
  • Migration of Cisco ACI Fabric to Cisco ACI Multi-Site
The main component of the Cisco ACI multi-site to manage the fabric in the pods is Cisco ACI Multi-site policy manager.


What is Cisco ACI Multi-Site policy manager and what are the functions of policy Manager ?
The Multi-Site policy manager provides these main functions:
  • With the help of Cisco ACI multi-site policy manager you can Create and manage Cisco ACI Multi-Site users and administrators and application of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) rules.
  • Well the main is to use the health dashboard to monitor the health, faults, and logs of inter site policies for all the Cisco ACI fabrics interconnected in the Multi-Site architecture.
  • You can add, delete and modify ACI sites with the help of Cisco ACI Multi-site policy manager.
  • With the help of Cisco ACI multi-site policy manager you can create inter site tenant policy profiles and deploy them across sites. This feature is one of the most important that the Multi-Site policy manager offers, together with the capability to define and provision scoped policies for change management and Define policy templates. Each template can be associated with and pushed to a specific set of fabrics