NCA Plus

NCA Plus ( Network Centric Application Plus ) is an application designed for ACI to simplify the creation of L2 networks. Designed for customers that want a simple way to extend Layer2 VLANS into an ACI fabric, NCA Plus does everything from definition of Tenants, Bridge Domains and End Point Groups (EPG's).

The application runs on top of a Flask Application and uses Javascript (Sijax) and other constructs to create a simple HTML application that can be deployed in a production environment using Apache/NGINX with WSGI.

Contacts:

• Rafael Muller ( rmuller@cisco.com )
• Santiago Flores ( sfloresk@cisco.com )
• Cesar Obediente ( cobedien@cisco.com )

Installation

As this is a Flask application you will need to either integrate the application in your production environment or you can get it operational in a virtual environment on your computer. In the distribution is a requirements.txt file that you can use to get the package requirements that are needed. The requirements file is located in the root directory of the distribution.

It might make sense for you to create a Python Virtual Environment before installing the requirements file. For information on utilizing a virtual environment please read http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/. Once you have a virtual environment active then install the packages in the requirements file.

(virtualenv) % pip install -r requirements.txt

After you have installed the requirements you have to install the CobraSDK files related to your version of APIC. APIC provies you these files directly via the URL:

http[s]://APIC_address/cobra/_downloads/

Download the two COBRA SDK files ( the models file and the sdk ).

The instructions to install them would be:

easy_install -Z {both files}

Once the SDK's are installed in the virtual environment, you can then change the application key in Flask

Inside this project Go to app -> init

Assign this variable:

app.secret_key = ''

This is a flask parameter, just choose a random string of no less than 40 characters. E.g: 'A0Zr4FhJASD1LFmw0918jHH!jm84$#ssaWQsif!1'

To run the the application just execute the run.py file. E.g. for a linux machine will be sudo python run.py

If you need to make the application visible outside your computer, change the run.py file with your own IP. You can also change the port that the application will be listening.