Adding Phsical Servers to Cisco ACI Fabric

This article describes how we connect physical, or bare metal, servers to the ACI Fabric.

A while ago I wrote an article about adding VMware integration to your ACI fabric. This is of course a very important step, as about 70% of people’s workloads are virtual. However, that number has been pretty static over the last few years. We don’t see many environments that are 100% virtual because some applications just run better on physical servers. They’re not even all legacy applications. There are new applications such as big data using Hadoop that require physical servers. So, I thought I’d write an article on how we connect physical, or bare metal, servers to the ACI Fabric. It’s not too difficult but we can’t just plug it in and expect it to work.

There are a few things that need to be done first, which I’ve covered in various articles already. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to configure Switch Profiles and Interface Policies for your bare metal servers. When you’re configuring these profiles you’ll need to figure out whether to use CDP or LLDP. You’ll also need to create a separate AEP for it. After that you can associate the AEP with a physical domain.

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