Wow, I realized that nearly seven years ago (19. December of 2015) I wrote about on how to do an “apic factory reset”. They way I describe and used back then, doesn’t work any more in recent versions.

For that reason I decided to write a quick new blog about how you can reset your Cisco APIC in 2022.

Why resetting your Cisco APIC?

This can have various reasons. Maybe you did a standalone upgrade/downgrade of your APIC to match the rest of your fabric. Then you have to factory reset the APIC first, before you can join it back into the Fabric.

How to perform a factory reset of your Cisco APIC

To reset the APIC, it requires three commands to run. You can run these commands directly through SSH, or also via CIMC or Serial. Depending on what you have available, but the commands are always the same.

• acidiag touch clean
  • Wipes the device
• acidiag touch setup
  • Resets the configuration an factory resets the device
• acidiag reboot
  • Reboots the APIC to enforce the changes.

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apic# acidiag touch clean
This command will wipe out this device. Proceed? [y/N] y

apic# acidiag touch setup
This command will reset the device configuration, Proceed? [y/N] y

apic# acidiag reboot
This command will restart the this device, Proceed? [y/N] y

When your intention is to reset a whole fabric, it’s recommended to reset the switches first:
Reset a ACI Spine/Leaf Switch
If you reset the APIC Controller first, you have to do this step through console afterwards.