About In-Band Management for Devices
The Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC) provides a mechanism for managing devices within each tenant in-band through the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric. This configuration option provides device management connectivity without requiring the management IP addresses used on devices to be routable within the infra tenant and mgmt tenant.
Note |
This feature is separate from in-band management for the Cisco APICs and fabric nodes. In-band management for the fabric is not required for you to manage devices in-band. |
In-band management communication between the Cisco APICs and devices is enabled by configuring unique IP addresses on the Cisco APICs. The IP addresses are known as controller endpoints. These IP addresses are not actually configured on the Cisco APIC interfaces, but instead are used in conjunction with Network Address Translation (NAT) to establish management communication with the devices. The NAT addresses that are used by the Cisco APICs are automatically selected by the Cisco APIC and fall within the 169.254.0.0/16 address range.
In addition, each device management IP address is presented to the Cisco APICs as a translated IP address. This translated address is referred to as the mapped host address.
The following figure depicts the address translation between the Cisco APIC and the devices: