Cisco Infrastructure Management Equipment

The infrastructure controller is the main architectural component of the Cisco ACI solution. It is the unified point of automation and management for the Cisco ACI fabric, policy enforcement, and health monitoring. The APIC appliance is a centralized, clustered controller that optimizes performance and unifies the operation of physical and virtual environments. The controller manages and operates a scalable multitenant Cisco ACI fabric.

The main features of the APIC include the following:

• Application-centric network policies.
• Data-model-based declarative provisioning.
• Application and topology monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Third-party integration; Layer 4 through Layer 7 (L4-L7) services - VMware vCenter and vShield - Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), and Azure Pack - Open Virtual Switch (OVS) and OpenStack - Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, Docker Enterprise.
• Image management (spine and leaf).
• Cisco ACI inventory and configuration.
• Implementation on a distributed framework across a cluster of appliances.
• Health scores for critical managed objects (tenants, application profiles, switches, etc.).
• Fault, event, and performance management.
• Isovalent®Cilium and eBPF integration for end-to-end observability

The controller framework enables broad ecosystem and industry interoperability with Cisco ACI. It enables interoperability between a Cisco ACI environment and management, orchestration, virtualization, and L4-L7 services from a broad range of vendors.