An organization has encountered many STP-related issues in the past due to failed hardware components. They are in the process of long-term migration to a newly deployed ACI fabric.
Senior engineers are worried that spanning-tree loops in the existing network may be extended to the ACI fabric. Which feature must be enabled on the ACI leaf ports to protect the fabric from spanning-tree loops?
Correct Answer: B
A Layer 2 loop does not impact the stability of an ACI fabric because ACI can broadcast traffic at line rate with little need to process the individual packets.
Layer 2 loops, however, can impact the ability of endpoints to process important traffic.
For this reason, mechanisms are needed to detect loops resulting from miscabling and misconfiguration.
One of the protocols ACI uses to detect such externally generated Layer 2 loops is MisCabling Protocol (MCP).
MCP is disabled in ACI by default. To enable MCP, you must first enable MCP globally and then ensure that it is also enabled at the interface policy level.
As part of the global enablement of MCP, you define a key that ACI includes in MCP packets sent out on access ports.
If ACI later receives an MCP packet with the same key on any other port, it knows that there is a Layer 2 loop in the topology.
In response, ACI can either attempt to mitigate the loop by disabling the port on which the MCP protocol data unit was received or it can generate a system message to notify administrators of the issue.
Reference:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/4-x/aci- fundamentals/Cisco-ACI-Fundamentals-401/Cisco-ACI-Fundamentals-
401_chapter_0101.html#concept_706016DC62404574B77A5A4B3AD3C905