Cisco ACI Reviews

The solution helps with business continuity.

Centralized management is valuable. PBR has been beneficial for network efficiency. It helps redirect the traffic to a node that is not necessarily a gateway.

The GUI is not easy to use. It must be made simple and convenient to use.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I have not faced any issues with performance or stability.

The tool is scalable. It can adapt to the growing needs of the business.

We contact the support team when we face any issues.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment is centrally provisioned. The initial setup might take a couple of days. The deployment depends on the scale and customer requirements. We need one engineer for the deployment. The maintenance requires some skill development.

The product is not cheap. It is usually expensive. However, the solution’s local presence and technical support sometimes make customers prefer it.

We see tangible benefits of policy-driven automation in a modern scale environment where frequent changes are required. However, the features and benefits are almost negligible for a relatively smaller and static environment. The vendor's local presence and the support provided are the main reasons customers choose Cisco ACI. I will recommend the product to others. We must ensure that the use case is well-defined to get the benefit and ROI from the product. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The main customers are Tata Consultancy and Data Communication Limited. For them, ACI's fabric capabilities, automation features, and specifically, the L4-L7 features and micro-segmentation are most valuable.

In legacy networks, managing changes requires individual tickets for each device. ACI's single pane of glass management through APIC is a big advantage.

So, single-tenant management is a plus.

Customer support for ACI needs improvement. Many customers prefer HPE because their internal support is different and easier to integrate with existing networks. This lack of awareness of ACI's capabilities makes customers stick to traditional networking.

My customers' internal teams lack ACI expertise, so Cisco should provide training or offer end-to-end use case support.

I have been using this solution for the last seven years. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It's quite scalable. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We have features like fabric provision and tenant isolation, which makes it competitive with other OEMs.

We have enterprises primarily as our customers. 

Support can be inconsistent. Some customers have had issues.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy to set up. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. Our clients have a private and hybrid cloud.  

Deployment timeframe can vary.  We get a chance to deploy the ACI on a quarterly basis.

The licensing is expensive. Customers find the price expensive.  

Remember, even a single network change with ACI instantly reflects across all devices.

Overall, Cisco ACI is excellent. I'd definitely give it a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is project-based. We deploy and configure upgraded ACIs, registered spines and leaves, and deliver projects to our customers. I'm a network consultant and we are gold partners of Cisco. 

The solution is valuable because it configures from a single point, from APs, and also all routers. Commands don't need to be configured on the spine and leaf side. You can control and manage the fabric from a single point. If you have serial numbers for your devices, they can all be registered with scripts. As a network engineer, you can configure and manage the fabric very easily. From the CLI side, it's really easy to configure from the GUI.

I faced issues when upgrading venues and registering devices. For example, in some cases, you have to reinstall the AP from scratch. We tried that and were then unable to register devices. From the network engineering perspective, it's hard to configure from the GUI. We tried to adapt but it was difficult. You have to add AP numbers for validations.

From an operational perspective, I think if you configure the fabric correctly, it's stable.

The solution is scalable; you can have multi-site scenarios. 

I have a good relationship with the technical support team, they are helpful. 

Because I have a system engineering background and I have MCSA and MCSE certification from Microsoft, the setup is very simple. The largest deployment I was involved in had 300 devices. 

This is an expensive solution, but it's high quality. I have experience with Huawei devices and Nokia. Huawei had many issues with bugs and I had hardware issues with Nokia. Cisco is the highest quality. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use this solution in our data centers. It is for connecting servers and increasing our bandwidth and resiliency.

Historically, we had four different computer rooms, and they were all configured differently.  When we went through the refresh and started using ACI, it was the first time that we had a consistent setup in all of our computer rooms.

The most valuable features are the ease of setup for redundancy, as well as centralized control.

The ability for us to figure out the traffic flows, to enable some of the more segmentation parts of it, is really tough with what is built into ACI. It would be nice if it were part of it.

The stability of this solution is great. We love it.

We have not hit the limit, so it's been very scalable for us. Redundancy has been great.

We hired an employee who used to work for Cisco technical support, and this person has been much more useful than the Cisco tech, itself. Technical support has not always been what we had hoped for.

However, we've had a lot of on-site support with our advanced services, and they've been great.

We work on state budget cycles, and several years went by without any kind of refresh. What we had were disparate solutions that were failing, and didn't have the same kind of redundancy or configuration. As such, the users were having a terrible experience so we had to do something. We then looked at ACI and Cisco and positioned it such that it made a lot of sense for us.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house.

We considered Cisco, Juniper, and VMware. Cisco rose to the top because of the support. It wasn't just the sale; they were going to be around afterward. We have a relationship there, that we trust.

Cisco is there for the long haul. It's been built by network people who understand the resiliency needs for network infrastructure. It's been reliable for us, as well as scalable. It can do our one-gig, ten-gig, forty-gig, hundred-gig, it can do it all, no matter if it's legacy or new.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for Cisco ACI is for managing our data center and network switches. We will use it for the whole data center environment eventually.

We are still growing it in our main data center. We haven't even expanded it to our recovery data center yet. As far as managing a static environment, so far, it's been great. When it comes to adding in new changes and new things, that's where we're going to have some challenges. Cisco ACI is difficult both technically to build it out and then operationally to manage.

It's improved the static configuration of our data center switching environment. But it's added some challenges to our ability to operationalize it and make it easier for people to manage. 

The good side of it is being able to control your network switching and routing in the data center from a single control point.

I don't have any new features that I need in Cisco ACI yet because we're still learning and making it work in our environment today. I don't have anything new. 

The one big challenge with it is Cisco going from a perpetual license model to a licensing model that is renewed every year. You pay a large fee to use stuff like this. That to me is one of our challenges.

Making training more available for all of our employees and not even at a cost would help. If you want this to be deployed to all the data centers everywhere it's got to be something that everyone can sit down and get training on. 

If you're going to try and operationalize it amongst existing staff members and even up-coming ones, it's not a simple thing to sit down and learn. 

I've been doing this for thirty-five years now. It's one of the most difficult things I've had to sit down and learn myself.

With the stability so far we've had very few issues with Cisco ACI. A couple of routing problems that were glitches within ACI. Other than that, the environment is stable and we like it.

Scalability is great in a Cisco ACI environment. But when you're migrating from an old data center into ACI, there are some challenges. 

In all the people that manage it, most are just trying to throw entire networks with multiple environments on them into ACI. It's good but it also has a lot of challenges for us.

Technical support is good but limited because Cisco ACI is so new. There's a lack of expertise on the support side. You need to get the right engineer on the call when you're having a problem.

The initial setup of the Cisco ACI is straightforward but also complex. Once you have designed how you're going to deploy it, i.e. your naming conventions and how you're going to configure things, it is standardized. 

That part of it is standard and easy to deploy. It's coming to that point where you've got the complexity of your naming conventions and all those things stood up properly that is hard.

It's only this engineer that we hired with a great mind who could make it work for us.

We relied on an engineer who we hired on a contract side but was well versed in a lot of things. He had not done an ACI in deployment. Between him and our dedicated Cisco support engineers, we were able to stand it up without too many issues.

The number one reason we chose it was that eventually, we will doing some sort of SD (Software Defined) access. When a user gets on the network and they connect, they'll have a persona. We'll know who they are. We'll know what to allow them into. A lot of that'll be controlled through ACI on the data center side.

We didn't have SD access. We're still going in that direction. It's going to be a while.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product in the five to six range. It is a good product. It will be solid as it matures. It's technically challenging for anyone.

One guy has stood up most of our environment. We are trying to use him to train all the rest of our staff. But it's a slow process. 

Understanding how to get in under the hood and make ACI work is not a simple task unless you're in and out of it regularly. Even the gentleman who installed it and works on it most of the time has to go back and play with it on his own before he makes changes. 

Just to remember how things are done is difficult because it's got a lot of uniqueness to it in the way things are deployed.

Anyone using Cisco ACI should know what their direction is. How much money do they have to spend? Then I could sit down with them and tell them whether ACI would the best solution or not for what they are doing. 

I don't think ACI is for everyone. It's for larger data centers that are going down this path of SD access. I am sure there are competitors out there now. We're just not looking into them because we already have ACI deployed. That where we're at now.

We use Cisco ACI for perimeter security and threat detection. 

The tool's initial deployment is complex and takes five hours to complete. 

I have been working with the solution for six to seven years. 

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. My company has around 150 users for the solution. 

The deployment took less than one week to complete. 

A partner helped us with Cisco ACI's implementation. 

The tool is easy to handle once deployed. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case is replacing Nexus 7000 with Cisco NX-OS. We would like to replace this actuator with the newer Cisco ACI platform. We currently use Cisco Nexus 9000.

Cisco ACI improved the stability of our IT system and our data center.

We currently use the smooth upgrade process available in Cisco ACI, and it's really useful. I also like the augmentation of the bandwidth available in the platform with 10 and 40 GB interfaces.

Cisco ACI helps us better secure our infrastructure from end to end because we can use a contract to secure flow between endpoints in the data center.

Because we can use automation processes with this platform, we have been able to free up our IT department's time.

We can deploy applications quickly with automation, and we have been able to save time overall as an organization as well.

Our problems with Cisco ACI are mainly related to the contracts and how to manage them easily in the platform. Cisco also needs to improve the log files and the complexity of the graphical interface.

Cisco ACI is stable, and we haven't had any problems with the stability of the system.

We haven't had any problems with scaling the platform because it's easy to add a leaf or spine.

We have had good experiences with Cisco's technical support. They respond quickly and with accurate responses.

It takes some time to understand the new terms and concepts, but the deployment itself is completely smooth. We didn't have any problems deploying the solution.

We first deployed the solution on our qualification data center so that we could test the solution before we deployed it in the production data center.

We implemented it with the help of an integrator.

The pricing and licensing are both high, particularly if you want a high level of functionality. It would be great if the price and licensing costs could be decreased.

Cisco ACI works well, and it has been a good investment for us. There are a few areas for improvement, so I would give Cisco ACI an overall rating of eight out of ten.

Cisco ACI is used in the data center ecosystem. It's an eco-space solution. It's a DMB solution where you have the big hybrid data center you want to deploy on-premises, so the goal is to integrate all the virtual environments on feature environment servers with the data center.

What's most valuable in Cisco ACI is that it isn't like the legacy infrastructure where you have a lot of complexity in a TTR architecture.

What I like most about Cisco ACI is that you can control those devices from a single console, even if you have three hundred devices. You can manage the entire infrastructure from a single point of contact, so Cisco ACI is a time saver.

Another exclusive feature of Cisco ACI is its API interface that lets you enhance automation within the environment.

You can manage your entire data center from a single interface through Cisco ACI. If you want to upgrade three hundred devices in one click, you can do that, and within one hour, all three hundred devices will be upgraded.

I also like that Cisco keeps enhancing the product by adding different features, so there have been five major releases of Cisco ACI.

Another valuable feature of the solution is that it's more user-friendly than Aruba and Juniper.

An area for improvement in Cisco ACI is security, which Cisco needs to enhance in the solution. Though Cisco ACI uses a whitelist model, you must purchase an external product, such as a security firewall solution, to make whitelisting work, which the customer could find expensive.

For example, you're a customer who has Cisco ACI, and the solution doesn't have IP-based filtering, so as a customer, you've purchased Cisco ACI. However, you still need to buy another product for security, and some customers wouldn't like that. However, some customers prefer to go with Cisco ACI because of its scalability and flexibility versus other solutions such as Juniper and Aruba.

Technical support for Cisco ACI also needs improvement, particularly in product knowledge.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Cisco ACI is segment routing. For example, if you have an MPLS network, you can't directly integrate it with Cisco ACI at the moment. Suppose you have multiple data centers you want to connect to the MPLS private link through your service provider. In that case, you can't directly integrate that with Cisco ACI without an external device, which doesn't make sense to the customer. Cisco recently introduced the MPLS feature in Cisco ACI, but it's not up to the mark.

We've been involved with Cisco ACI since 2015, and have deployed the solution for more than thirty projects.

Cisco ACI used to be unstable, but after version 4.2, it's been very stable in the production environment.

Scalability-wise, Cisco ACI is a good solution because you can have more than five thousand servers in one ACI fabric. There's a lot of flexibility and scalability in Cisco ACI because you can even seamlessly integrate it with legacy infrastructure despite having a different data center.

Cisco support used to be good, but over time, many newbies were hired to provide technical support for Cisco ACI and other Cisco products, so the quality has decreased. The support provided before 2018 was good, but now, the Cisco technical support team has been struggling to give good support or provide expertise in some areas.

For example, if you raise an issue, you have to ask multiple engineers and make numerous escalations. Cisco ACI is a good product, but the support quality nowadays isn't up to the mark.

Cisco requires the customer to have some experience with the product before deployment, but novice technical support is brought in without sufficient training or without training the newbies for at least six months. The technical support team seems to just select cases and works on those without enough knowledge, so the customer experience is bad.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating Cisco support a three.

Some customers used Juniper and Aruba but went with Cisco ACI because the other two solutions weren't as user-friendly.

Anyone setting up Cisco ACI for the first time will see that it requires a lot of resources. Still, even if the initial setup is complicated, you can refer to the Cisco website regarding the steps you need to perform to complete the setup. Cisco explained the process well, and you can even take a workshop on it.

From a configuration point of view, I found Cisco ACI complex because it isn't easy to create the policy. Unless you have a good networking background, you won't be able to set up Cisco ACI easily.

For example, if your organization doesn't have experienced engineers, Cisco provides a two-day workshop for your engineers. Cisco also offers many free tools in the market to help you set up your account.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the initial setup for Cisco ACI as four.

Pricing for Cisco ACI could be expensive if you're not a gold partner. If you're a gold partner, you'll get reasonable pricing, but to become a gold partner, you must cross several layers. For example, at least twenty engineers within your organization have to be certified, with each certification priced at £2,000 minimum, so this would make some companies think twice about the product. If you're going for Aruba and Juniper products, on the other hand, you can quickly get the partner status, and you can start selling the product.

As a gold partner, you can get up to seventy percent discount on Cisco ACI, for example, while an ordinary partner gets ten percent off.

Cisco ACI is expensive for both customers and partners, but I'm rating pricing for the product as four out of five because even if the price is costly, you get a lot of benefits from the product.

Cisco ACI isn't the best, price-wise, but it's still a good solution. If you're in a small organization, you may be unable to afford it. Cisco ACI is best for enterprises but not SMBs because Cisco ACI and its required resources are expensive.

I've evaluated VMware NSX, but it can't compete with Cisco ACI. Cisco ACI is a hardware-level product that can support terabytes and petabytes of data at the same time, which VMware NSX can't do because it's a virtual environment with limited throughput and scalability.

If you're planning to apply terabytes of traffic in VMware NSX, you'll find it hard, and the solution will eventually choke after some time.

Cisco ACI has the best scalability. Cisco also has categories where particular hardware will be recommended based on your requirement, for example, whether you have petabytes or terabytes of data.

My company is mainly involved with three products, Cisco ACI, Cisco FTD, and Cisco WebDialer.

My company is a reseller/integrator for Cisco ACI.

I'd rate Cisco ACI as nine out of ten.