ACI Simulator is small virtual topology containing one ACI Controller, one spine, and two leafs. It comes as a packaged OVA file. I recently had an issue while playing with it : the APIC was not able to discover the demo topology.

I was able to configure the controller on boot, but wasn’t able to discover the spine and leafs. The nodes were invisible. I found out that you should not modify anything during the initialization of the controller! Especially the TEP vlans and subnets. I just play with the management ip address and gateway, and finally was able to discover my spine and leafs under “Nodes Pending Registration” in “Fabric Membership”.

If you are not able to have hands on the controller, be sure that your VM has the minimum requirements. As I am writing, it is 12vCPU, 24GB of ram, and a 100GB drive.

You can download ACI Simulator here.