Question

Nutanix / VMware NSX / Cisco ACI

  • 6 May 2019
  • 7 replies
  • 1534 views

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Hello Community,

I have some doubts about running Nutanix on VMWare with ESXi with Cisco ACI fabric.

To start, we have already married ourselves to a Cisco ACI network fabric (two sites connected with 12x10Gbit fiber (120Gbit)). We are using an IPN / Spine / Leaf topology, with APIC clusters in each site. In each DC there will be 24 Nutanix Nodes.

All of my question have to do with the best practices of integrating these technologies.

1) Is it necessary to use VMware NSX to reap the benefits of Cisco ACI?
2) Can we just use a simple VMware installation (without NSX) and allow Nutanix full access to the ACI fabric?
3) Whats the best practices related to these three technologies coexisting together?

I have found documents on Nutanix/ACI and Nutanix/VMWare, but I cant find anything on using all three together in terms of hierarchy and how to stitch it all together. Any guidance from those who have experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Michael

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7 replies

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Nobody knows?
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Ok, so I have been investigating and see that the ACI fabric creates distributed vSwitches within VMWare. How does Nutanix handle that? Will Karbon be friendly to this type of setup?
Userlevel 1
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If ACI creates the dvSwitches in VMware then nutanix I would think nutanix should Handel it just fine, since esxi/vSphere are running like they would on any hardware. We use dvSwitches in our esxi/vSphere environment on. Nutanix just like we would on any hardware.
Userlevel 3
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There is an ACI best practices section on the Cisco ACI with NUTANIX document, It could provide some help.

@AntonioG The link is broken to that documentation, or doesnt exist anymore. Could you provide another link please? We’re using all three as well. 

 

Thanks

Userlevel 3
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Please try this one:

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=BP-2052-Cisco-ACI:BP-2052-Cisco-ACI

 

That worked thank you!