Users Guide

17 Dell EMC PowerEdge MX SmartFabric Configuration Guide with Cisco ACI
4.2 Cisco APIC configuration
The Cisco APIC configuration includes the ports connected to the R730xd rack servers and the vPC that
connects to the MX9116n FSE VLT port channel. This includes configuration of the ACI fabric interfaces,
switches, creating VLAN Pool, policies, policy group and profiles, as well as configuring application-level
elements such as ACI endpoint groups (EPGs) and bridge domains (BDs). This configuration should be done
before creating the SmartFabric.
The networks used in the validated environment are shown in Table 3 on page 13, along with the
corresponding bridge domain, and application EPG names used in APIC configuration.
Before creating a SmartFabric, steps need to be performed to configure ACI.
The following steps were performed in the Cisco APIC GUI to configure ACI for the environment shown in
Section 4.1.
4.2.1 Create a VLAN Pool
1. Go to Fabric > Access Policies > Pools > VLAN.
2. From the VLAN screen, right-click on VLAN and select Create VLAN Pool.
3. In the Name field, enter VLANPool1.
4. From the Allocation mode option, select Static.
In this example, the static allocation mode is used because it is important that the VLAN ID is the same as
used in ACI and on the MX platform. Dynamic allocation mode enables APIC to choose VLANs from the pool
dynamically.
Note: Always use static mode when the VLAN pool is referenced from a static source, such as a static path
binding for an EPG for use with servers.