Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Virtual Pod (vPod) is a software-only solution that enables you to virtually extend the Cisco ACI fabric into bare-metal cloud environments and other remote locations. It is in general availability beginning in Cisco APIC Release 4.0(2).

You can deploy Cisco ACI vPod wherever you have at least two servers on which you can run the ESXi hypervisor. It allows you to use Cisco ACI Virtual Edge where you do not have a physical leaf.

Cisco ACI vPod and its components—a pair of virtual spines (vSpines), a pair of virtual leafs (vLeafs), and Cisco ACI Virtual Edge—run on the ESXi hypervisor. The vSpines and vLeafs handle control plane management, and the Cisco ACI Virtual Edge handles packet forwarding, policy enforcement, and all data plane management.

Cisco ACI vPod manages a data center defined by the VMware vCenter Server. You can have up to eight instances of Cisco ACI Virtual Edge in each Cisco ACI vPod in the remote location. You use Cisco APIC to manage Cisco ACI vPod nodes and enforce Cisco ACI policy in the virtual data center.

Cisco ACI vPod communicates with a physical, on-premises pod or multipod over an interpod network. You configure the physical pod or multipod, the interpod connection, and Cisco ACI vPod in Cisco APIC. You then use the Cisco ACI vCenter plug-in, a Python script, or PowerCLI to deploy Cisco ACI vPod component virtual machines (VMs).

Cisco ACI vPod is compatible with any server hardware listed in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide.

You can find information about Cisco ACI vPod in the following documents on Cisco.com:

• Cisco ACI Virtual Pod Release Notes

• Cisco ACI Virtual Pod Installation Guide

• Cisco ACI Virtual Pod Getting Started Guide