Which component provides Cisco ACI fabric with Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity across pods and physical locations?

An Inter-Pod Network (IPN) provides the underlay connectivity between different pods but is not the overlay technology itself that provides the L2/L3 connectivity for tenants.

VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) is the key overlay technology used in Cisco ACI to extend Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks across the fabric. It encapsulates tenant traffic over an IP-based underlay, enabling logical networks to span physical boundaries like pods and data centers. This allows for flexible workload placement and seamless connectivity across the ACI fabric.

The COOP (Council Of Oracle Protocol) control plane is responsible for host and endpoint learning within ACI, but it does not provide the actual data plane connectivity.

The Cisco APIC control cluster is the centralized management and orchestration point for the ACI fabric, not a component that provides data plane L2/L3 connectivity.