Important
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The ACI Simulator Appliance Server is no longer for sale after June 20, 2019, as noted here. For recent and future releases, you can download the Cisco ACI Simulator VM, an OVA file that can be installed in a virtual
machine (VM) on any server that meets the installation requirements.
The ACI Simulator Appliance Server can only simulate the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure
Controller (APIC) 4.2 releases and earlier. To simulate later releases, use the ACI Simulator virtual machine. For more information, see the Cisco ACI Simulator VM Installation Guide.
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The intent of the ACI Simulator is to provide real, fully-featured Cisco APIC software, along with a simulated fabric infrastructure of leaf switches and spine switches in one physical server. Because
the ACI Simulator includes Cisco APICs with real production software, you can use it to understand features, exercise APIs, and initiate integration with third-party
orchestration systems and applications. The native GUI and CLI of the Cisco APIC use the same APIs that are published to third parties.
The ACI Simulator includes simulated switches, so you cannot validate a data path. However, some of the simulated switch ports have been mapped
to the front-panel server ports which allows you to connect external management entities such as ESX servers, VMware vCenters,
VMware vShields, bare metal servers, Layer 4 to Layer 7 services, AAA systems, and other physical or virtual service appliances.
In addition, the ACI Simulator allows simulation of faults and alerts to facilitate testing and to demonstrate features.
One instance of the production Cisco APIC is shipped per server appliance. By contrast, the ACI Simulator includes three actual Cisco APIC instances and two simulated leaf switches and two simulated spine switches in a single server. As a result, the performance
of the ACI Simulator is slower than deployments on production hardware.
Using the Simulator, you can perform operations on the simulated fabric using any of the following functional interfaces:
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graphical user interface (GUI)
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command line interface (CLI)
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application programming interface (API)
The ACI Simulator consists of simulation software running on a special version of the Cisco UCS C220 M3 or M4 High-Density Rack Server. For
information about the hardware installation and requirements of the physical server, you can refer to the documentation for
the Cisco UCS C220 Server at this URL: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C220/install/C220.html
Note
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The ACI Simulator software cannot be installed separately on a standard Cisco UCS C220 Server or on other servers. The software runs only on
the ACI Simulator server, which has the following PID:
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