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TERMS & CONDIT ION

16. Virtual Port

Channel (vPC) in
ACI
 APRIL 7, 2021  LEAVE A COMMENT

Virtual port
 channel (vPC) in
ACI

A virtual port channel (vPC) allows links that are

physically connected to two different ACI leaf nodes to
appear as a single port channel to a third device (i.e.,
network switch, server, any other networking device
that supports link aggregation technology).
vPCs consist of two ACI leaf switches designated as vPC
peer switches. Of the vPC peers, one is primary and one
is secondary. The system formed by the switches is
referred to as a vPC domain.
T h e f o l l ow i n g b e h a v i o r i s s p e c i f i c t o t h e AC I
vP C implementation:
• No de dicate d p eer-link b etween the vPC
p e e r s ; instead the fabric itself serves as the MCT.
• P e e r R e a c h a b i l i t y p r o t o c o l – ZMQ is utilized in
lieu of CFS.
• ZMQ is an open-source high-performance messaging
library that uses TCP as transport.
• This library is packaged as libzmq on the switch and
linked into each application that needs to communicate
with vPC peers.
• P e e r - r e a c h a b i l i t y is not handled via a physical
peer link; instead, routing triggers are used to detect
peer reachability.
• The vPC Manager registers with URIB for peer route
noti�cations.
• When ISIS discovers a route to the peer, URIB noti�es
vPC manager, in turn, attempts to open the ZMQ socket
with the peer.
• When the peer route is withdrawn by ISIS, the vPC
manager is again noti�ed by URIB, and it brings the
MCT link down.

Series of elements that need to be

created �rst before we can create
the VPCs.

The steps are:

Create Interface Policies

Create Interface Policy Group
Create Interface Pro�les (interface selectors)
Create Switch Pro�le
Create VPC Explicit Protection Group
•Traf�c is both sourced and destined to the anycastvPC
VTEP address from remote Leaves
•A hardware hash in the spine will determine which of
the two peers forwards a speci�c �ow downstream to
the attached device (�ow hashing between the peers
via the spine
•In the event of a downlink failure on one of the peers
(all local member ports are down)
1.A bounce entry is created for the endpoints reachable
via the port-channel pointing to the peers VTEP
2.All MAC/IP to Leaf bindings for the speci�c vPC are
removed from the COOP database and the spine proxy
•On failure of a peer the remaining Leaf converts all vPC
ports to non-VPC local ports

vPC provides the following

technical bene�ts:

.Eliminates Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) blocked ports

.Uses all available uplink bandwidth
.Allows dual-homed servers to operate in active/active
mode
.Provides fast convergence upon link or device failure
.Offers dual active/active default gateways for servers

Commands to Check vpc (CLI)

show port-channel extended

show vpc extended
show vpc consistency-parameters interface port-
channel