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Cisco DCID 300-610 study materials
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Cisco DCID 300-610: Data Center Infrastructure and Automation Design

Cisco DCID 300-610 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Data Center Infrastructure and Automation Design

Infrastructure and Automation Design tests how you operationalize the fabric: management platforms, programmability interfaces, and automation pipelines for NX-OS, ACI, UCS, and SAN.

Rules

  • Management platforms. Nexus Dashboard (with Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, the successor to DCNM) manages LAN VXLAN EVPN and SAN fabrics; Cisco Intersight manages UCS and C-series, including Intersight Managed Mode, where policies and profiles live in Intersight rather than UCSM. ACI has its own APIC controller.
  • Programmability interfaces. NX-OS offers NX-API (JSON-RPC over HTTP/HTTPS after feature nxapi), NETCONF/YANG, RESTCONF, gNMI streaming telemetry, on-box Python, Guest Shell, and EEM. Prefer model-driven interfaces to CLI scraping-parsing show output breaks across releases.
  • Automation tooling. Ansible (nxos_*, intersight_*, aci_* modules), Terraform providers for Intersight and ACI, and direct REST to APIC. Designs should be idempotent, version-controlled, and validated in a lab or simulator before production.
  • Telemetry. Streaming push (gNMI dial-out, OpenConfig) replaces SNMP polling at scale; design collectors and retention before enabling high-frequency streams.
  • Access control. Every API call authenticates; use RBAC roles, service accounts, and audit logs.

Worked example

Design a pipeline that provisions a new ACI tenant and matching UCS service profiles for its web tier.

  1. Store intent in YAML (tenant, VRF, BD, EPGs, contract, server count, pool names).
  2. Ansible creates ACI objects with aci_tenant, aci_vrf, aci_bd, aci_epg, and aci_contract; a second play uses intersight_server_profile with pools defined in Intersight.
  3. Post-provision validation runs NX-API or APIC REST queries and asserts endpoint learning and profile association.
  4. Re-running the play must be a no-op; if it is not, the module parameters are wrong. The reasoning: declarative modules make the pipeline idempotent, and API-level validation catches drift that a successful playbook run can hide.

Traps

  • Assuming NX-API is on by default.
  • Building automation on screen-scraped CLI output.
  • Hard-coding credentials instead of using vaults or RBAC service accounts.
  • Treating DCNM and Nexus Dashboard as the same product without checking release naming.
  • Enabling telemetry without sizing collectors and retention.