This blog is a joint collaboration between Cisco’s Ravi Balakrishnan and F5’s Patrick Campbell
Over the past 2 years, we’ve been working on enabling F5 ADC services within the Cisco ACI fabric using the F5 ServiceCenter App. This App is an agile development effort. driven by field and user input and has evolved in multiple releases which are available from Cisco’s DC App Center. The App downloads count continues to climb evidencing its value to our joint users. Recently, we released F5 ACI ServiceCenter v2.9 and we have reached a significant milestone of more than 1190 downloads as of that date.
What is new in F5 ACI ServiceCenter v2.9
- Brownfield support for Default Gateway on FASC L2-L3 tab
- All partition option supported for VLAN, VIP and Node visibility tables [Visibility enhancement]
- Default route domain display supported for partitions on visibility tables [Visibility enhancement]
- VLAN table enhancement to display Self IPs, Interfaces information [Visibility enhancement]
- VIP table should show the tenant|app|epg for the VIP instead of node’s tenant|app|epg [Visibility enhancement]
- FASC LDAP support for admin users
- VIP discovery support MAC Masquerade MAC
F5 Service Center plugin
If this is a new topic for you and want to know more about F5- Cisco ACI integration, there are useful externally facing collaterals, demos, and labs created jointly by F5 and Cisco:
- Demos & labs across spectrum of experience levels:
- F5 & Cisco ACI Essentials (technical) Series
- Cisco ACI and F5 BIG-IP Design Guide White Paper
Recently, Cisco’s Max Alvarado (Technical Solutions Architect) posted a new chapter in his YouTube series on ACI. This series is widely followed within the ACI user community and a great way to learn how use our technologies to more effectively to achieve your objectives. This video entitled ” Episode 4: Configuring F5 Load Balancers from APIC using ServiceCenter App” shows how to install F5 ACI ServiceCenter App on APIC and how to integrate load balancing into ACI by configuring Virtual Servers, Server Pools, Service Graphs and the IP addresses for F5 Big IP Load Balancer, all done through the APIC.
Positive Outcomes
We’re continuing to build value into the F5 ACI ServiceCenter as users continue to leverage its capabilities into their operational responsibilities. It’s been rewarding to see the acknowledgement from our joint customers and each company’s field organizations of the positive outcome achieved through this partnership…. through teamwork & collaboration.
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