The Cisco ACI Simulator enables you to simulate the Cisco ACI fabric, including the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches supported in a leaf-and-spine topology, to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems management approach. Specifically, the ACI simulator environment comprises 2 ACI spines, 2 ACI leafs, and 3 APIC controllers.
The Cisco ACI Simulator includes simulated switches, so you cannot validate the data path. However, some of the simulated switch ports are mapped to the front-panel server ports which allows you to connect external management entities such as VMware ESX servers, VMware vCenter, VMware vShield, and bare-metal servers; Layer 4 through 7 services; authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) systems; and other physical and virtual service appliances. In addition, the Cisco ACI Simulator allows simulation of faults and alerts to facilitate testing and demonstrate features.
Benefits/features
The ACI simulator provides a variety of features and benefits, key ones summarized in the table below.
| Fabric Management | Topology view, Fabric discovery |
| Creation of network constructs | Build a tenant, private layer 3 network, bridged domain |
| Specify Cisco ACI policy constructs | Create Filters, Contracts |
| Application deployment | create Application Network Profiles, End-point groups |
| Virtualization Integration | VMware ESXi, vCenter, vshield |
| L4-L7 services integration | Cisco ASA/ASAv, Citrix NetScaler and F5 BIG-IP |
| Monitoring and troubleshooting | View faults, events, managed objects etc through GUI |
| Programmability with Northbound API clients | Python, REST APIS with JSON & XML bindings, PowerShell etc |
References:
https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter
Cisco ACI compatibility matrix