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Updates in Cisco ACI 5.2

July 14, 2021 , ,

 Most of you already knew about the Cisco ACI platform and the new release with the new features added to Cisco ACI 5.2. We are going to discuss about the new feature announcements from Cisco in Cisco ACI 5.2. Let's start with the basic about the Cisco ACI

What is Cisco ACI ?
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a Next generation SDN solution and is designed for data centers spine-leaf architecture for the policy-driven solution. Cisco ACI provides application agility and data center automation with simplified operations.

We wrote some of the past articles on Cisco ACI solution and the key features around Cisco ACI, You can have the look on these articles below

Cisco ACI 2.0 details  
Cisco ACI 3.0 details
Cisco ACI 4.1 details

Let's now talk about Cisco ACI 5.2 new feature enhancements

Fig 1.1- Cisco ACI anywhere anytime

  • Policy Based Routing (PBR) Enhancements: As you already see a lot innovation happens to make PBR better in Cisco ACI. Now with Cisco ACI 5.2, PBR on L3out is supported which is not there on previous versions. The other is Dynamic MAC learning on L3 PBR is also going to support in Cisco ACI 5.2 with Inter-EPG contract support on L3out with permit, deny and PBR actions.
  • Endpoint Security Group (ESG) Enhancements: This is important update from Cisco, you can have now additional classifiers support in Cisco ACI 5.2 which is MAC and VM-Tag. The other feature enhancement is Tag Selector support which enables migration of End Point Group (EPG) to ESG.
  • APIC Cluster connectivity to Fabric over L3 network: Now you can have the deployment of APIC cluster in a remote location and that is supported in Cisco ACI 5.2 and connect to ACI Fabric over IP network.
  • Support for back-to-back link between Remote leaf pair: Did you remember hair-pining ? well now you can have East-West traffic between nodes behind a pair of remote leaf's and can leverage the physical links between the remote leaf pairs while you are doing it with hair-pining earlier.
  • Software Maintenance Upgrade support : You can have now ability to upgrade APIC or Fabric Switch using a patch.
  • Microsoft Azure update : Now you can view existing brownfield VNETs from within the Cloud APIC purview and connect their greenfield VNETs to the brownfield VNETs imported into Cloud ACI while using Azure.
  • Amazon AWS Update: You can now auto configure your AWS Transit Gateway Connect (TGW) via Cloud APIC to support dynamic routing between Cisco Cloud Service Routers and the AWS Transit Gateway. The other thing is to deploy the Cloud ACI solution with a private backbone network between on-premises and AWS data centers.
  • VMware update: Well now you can have support for enhanced LACP on interfaces of Layer4 to Layer7 virtual service devices used in service graphs. VMware enhanced LACP support for virtual Layer4 to Layer7 devices.
  • Telecom support: With the Cisco ACI 5.2, now you can have Telecom PTP profile (G.8275.1) supported.
  • BGP update: Support for multiple next-hops to be propagated in the Cisco ACI fabric for redistributed routes in BGP for floating L3Outs. The SoO is a BGP extended community attribute that uniquely identifies the site from which a route is learned in order to prevent routing loops is supported in Cisco ACI 5.2.