Cisco ACI Interview Questions and Answers

 1) What are the benefits of Nexus ACI compared to traditional network solution/architecture?

A:  

i) Central Management Solution to manage the total network Infrastructure

ii) Spine and Leaf Architecture compared to 3 Tier Architecture

iii) Real Time monitoring from Central Management Plane

iv) Ability to create the network configuration based upon application requirements

v) Integration with Vmware Vsphere, Hyper-V ( Ability to configure the network constructs of Vmware and Hyper V)

2) What happens if all the APIC Controllers go down in the network?

A: 

i) We would not be able to do the configuration but the traffic forwarding will have no impact

ii) We need to bring the APIC Controllers in order to make the configurations in the network

3) What is the difference between network-centric and application-centric in ACI?

A: 

Network Centric ( A Bridge domain can contain only one EPG )

Application Centric ( A Bridge domain can contain more than one EPG )

4) What is the Bridge Domain?

A: The bridge domain is like a container for subnets — it's used to define an L2 boundary, (Which contains the IP address of the Gateway)

5) How many Tenants are created by Default in ACI?

A: 

i) MGMT 

ii) common 

iii) INFRA

6) How would you integrate existing networks into ACI Network?

A:

i) Create an L2OUT connection between ACI and Traditional Network

ii) Then Slowly Migrate the Servers to ACI Environment

iii) Then Migrate Default Gateway from Traditional Network to ACI

7) What settings do you need to enable on the Bridge Domain when you connect ACI with Traditional Leaf Switches?

A: 

i) Layer2 Flooding needs to be enabled

ii) ARP Flooding needs to be enabled

8) How does spanning Tree work in ACI?

A: 

i) ACI Does not work with Spanning Tree protocol

ii) BPDUs forwarded within a single EPG only

iii) Layer2 Loop is handled by External L2 Switches not ACI Switches

iv) BPDUs sent over Native VLAN for MST ( Multiple Spanning Tree protocol)

v) We need to explicitly enable Native VLAN EPG for Native VLAN

9) What is MCP in ACI?

A:

MCP stands for Miscabling Protocol used by ACI to detect the loops in the network

10) How would you Migrate existing networks to ACI Network?

A:

i) Design and deploy new Cisco ACI Fabric

ii) Connect Existing Network with Cisco ACI Fabric

iii) Migrate workloads to Cisco ACI Fabirc