Cisco ACI Naming convention thoughts

As you might know, Cisco ACI is a object related product. Every object you will create has to be named with a unique name so it can be identified later. Because of the simple fact that you cannot rename objects (it’s not implemented yet) it’s highly recommended to think of a good naming convention before you start creating the first one.
If you really want to rename an earlier created object, you have to remove and recreate the object and link it again to all other linked object.
To give you a head start on the naming convention, you have to think about the following objects:

Fabric naming

  • SPINE / LEAF switch naming
  • APIC Naming
  • VLAN-pools
  • Domains
  • Attachable Access Entity Profile
  • Link Level Policy
  • Interface policy group
  • Interface Selector
  • Switch Selector
  • Switch Profile

Creating a naming convention is network specific, but try to take the following tips in consideration:
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Cisco ACI Initial APIC configuration

There are a lot of blog posts around about the Cisco ACI technology and design tips and tricks. If you want to know more about ACI, please read the Cisco ACI Fundamentials 
This post describes your first steps to create and installation of a ACI fabric. Our example design will look like this:
ACI network layout
Our network will exist in only one datacenter with two spine switches, two leaf switches and two  APIC controllers. The spine and leaf switches are connected with 40Gb/s, the APIC controllers are multihomed with 1Gb/s links.
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