View ACI Network Structure by Tenant

By following the steps below, you can view the detailed information about a tenant (or VRF) in an ACI fabric:

• General structure: Tenant > VRF > EPG > Endpoints.
• Overlay topology of a tenant (or VRF) in the fabric.
• Underlay topology of a tenant (or VRF) in the fabric.

1. Select Network in the left pane of your NetBrain desktop.
2. In the Network pane, select Cisco ACI in the Category field.
3. In the View field, select Network Centric View > Tenant View. The ACI data model in NetBrain is organized in this order: Multi Site Folder > MSO (Multi Site Orchestrator) > APIC Domain > Tenant > VRF > EPG (Endpoint Group) > Endpoint.
   
4. Click a VRF node. You can view the overlay/underlay context map of this VRF.
   

Tip: For more context maps supported under the Tenant View, see Context Maps for details.

Overlay Topology 

The overlay topology represents the logical relationship among VRF > Subnet > Endpoint, including:

• The connection of this VRF to an external network as well as the relevant external nodes.
• The mapping of Bridge Domain (in this VRF) to VLAN and subnet.
• Endpoints in an EPG.

The following figure displays the overlay topology of a VRF node.

Underlay Topology 

The underlay topology represents the physical resources occupied by a tenant, including:

• All IPN/ISN nodes in the VRF
• Spine and leaf switches that belong to this VRF
• L3 Out and L2 Out switches in the VRF
• Connectivity of these nodes

NetBrain currently provides two different underlay structures of a VRF node:

• Multi-Pod deployed in a single Data Center (direct IPN connection among multiple Spines)
• Multi-Pod deployed across different Data Centers (indirect IPN connection among multiple Spines or ISN connection among Multi-Site)

Note: Indirect IPN connection can refer to an L3 Network or MPLS Network.

The following figure shows the underlay structure of direct IPN connection between two Spines.