cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
596
Views
10
Helpful
1
Replies

Cisco ACI

Hamada Ahmed
Level 1
Level 1

Why in ACI Arch, it's recommend to  not connect leafs to leafs or spine to spine?

What is the technical reason?

 

1 Reply 1

Claudia de Luna
Spotlight
Spotlight

Hi @Hamada Ahmed 

 

The technical reason is that ACI is a CLOS fabric which is a mathematical design intended to facilitate non blocking communication.

 

If you think of your ACI fabric as a big modular switch with a backplane (the spines) and multiple line cards (the leafs), its the same reason you don't (generally) connect a line card to a line card. 

 

Here is the original paper by Charles Clos in 1952.

https://archive.org/details/bstj32-2-406

 

.. and a great summary from this Nanog presentation

Demystifying DataCenter CLOS networks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3KeAa9xw

Save 25% on Day-2 Operations Add-On License