I85PREP
⌘ K
300-640 DCAI study materials
300-640 DCAI study resources

300-640 DCAI: Automation, Orchestration, and Operations

300-640 DCAI · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Automation, Orchestration, and Operations

This domain tests how you build and run an AI fabric repeatably: a source of truth, template-driven configuration, programmatic interfaces, and telemetry-driven validation instead of CLI sessions on individual switches.

The Cisco toolchain

  • Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the operations platform hosting NDFC (fabric controller), NDI (Insights, for analytics and validation), and NDO (Orchestrator, for multi-site policy).
  • NDFC discovers fabrics, applies per-switch and per-fabric policy templates, and provisions new switches through POAP (DHCP plus image and config delivery).
  • NDI provides pre-change and post-change validation, flow analytics, and anomaly detection; it is an assurance tool, not a configuration tool.
  • Cisco Intersight manages UCS and Intersight Cloud Orchestrator workflows server-side.
  • Interfaces: YANG models over NETCONF/RESTCONF, gNMI streaming telemetry, REST APIs, Ansible collections, and Terraform providers. Prefer streaming telemetry over polling.

Worked example: adding 16 leaves

  1. Define the fabric in NDFC with the correct NX-OS version and policy templates.
  2. Pre-stage DHCP and the POAP definition so new switches receive image and management IP on first boot.
  3. Let discovery add the switches; NDFC computes the expected configuration from the fabric policy.
  4. Before the change window, run an NDI pre-change analysis against the proposed policy to catch reachability, MTU, VLAN, and QoS deltas.
  5. Deploy, then re-run compliance to confirm the running config matches intent. Reasoning: the template is the source of truth, the device config is derived. Anything typed manually creates drift that the next deployment overwrites or breaks.

Operational practice

  • Track a compatibility matrix between Nexus Dashboard release, NX-OS release, and the NDFC/NDI versions; mismatches block upgrade paths.
  • Maintain an inventory of GPU nodes and their rail mapping so a cable change does not silently break rail alignment.
  • Automate firmware and BIOS compliance through Intersight profiles rather than one-off upgrades.

Traps that cost marks

  • Treating NDI as a configuration interface.
  • Using manual CLI changes that later conflict with fabric policy.
  • Ignoring release compatibility between Nexus Dashboard and NX-OS.
  • Polling SNMP every few minutes when nanosecond-scale queue counters are needed.