Cisco ACI Reviews

Our primary use for this solution is centralization.

This solution has improved the way we operate because it is a time-saver.

This solution allows you to do everything quicker and more efficiently.

The CLI needs to be improved.

This product is pretty stable. 

The scalability is really good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Our setup is still in progress.

We used an integrator to assist us.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten 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 are transforming from an old legacy, non-Cisco network to a state-of-the-art data center.
Cisco ACI is reducing a lot of competence on the network. We are reducing a lot of assets, a footprint itself. It has one single pane of glass management. We use it to support our clients.

The efficiency in terms of the data center latency has been reduced by around 20-30%. Our applications function a lot better. We get a lot of intuitive data to know how our application stack is performing. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the single pane of management. You can have various API integrations and you can have software-defined scripts.

Cisco ACI can build things for you which was not possible on legacy networks. 

The additional features I would like to see included in the next releases are support for our policy-based routing. There are endpoint issues that are there now in the code. Hopefully, these will get fixed in the future code. 

In terms of scriptings, there are a lot of APIs available but there's a big gap with networking and the application. That's a gap that we're trying to bridge to understand how to do scripting. 

So far, the stability has been good. There have been a lot of updates going in and things are getting a lot better.

Cisco ACI is very scalable. There's no real length to it. If you look at ACI, you can have an endless number of layers. 

The size of our environment is about 2,000 nodes. It's not a huge network, it's pretty medium-sized.

We use technical support for this product. We have our internal support team also. If we have additional feedback needed, we go back to Cisco. We are Cisco partners. Our experience with their support has been very good. I can communicate directly with certain BUs. 

We have been able to communicate with Cisco directly on certain questions. There are issues which have been very easy to resolve.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex at all. It is plug-and-play. Then you add more switches into the network and you don't need to configure anything. 

We have not yet seen the ROI. We are in a transformation journey right now where you can clearly see how that is happening.

We have the smart licensing, but that was supported when we bought ACI. Smart licensing was not there previously. Recently, we migrated to the new code.

We had to convert to smart licensing. Licensing is for the overall number of nodes. We have a license for all 1,000 nodes right now.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product at an 8 to leave a little bit of room for improvement.

I would advise someone considering this solution to do your homework. If you are trying to consolidate your data center, Cisco  ACI is probably the best product out there.

We use this solution for our data center infrastructure. We are a small, private university, supporting a mix of cloud and on-premise applications.

This solution saves us time. The integration with vCenter means that when I create something on the network, it only has to happen one time instead of many times for our many virtual hosts.

The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter, as it makes it easier for the systems and network to interoperate.

I would like to see simpler contract building, engineering, and architecture.

There should be an alternative "ACI Light" solution for smaller-sized enterprises.

This solution has been very solid. We've had no problems in the three years that we have been using it.

We haven't really grown or changed the network since this solution was installed, so I cannot comment on scalability.

Technical support for this solution is great. The ACI guys have been some of the best technical support people that I've worked with at Cisco. They just seem to know things better than the other groups within their support infrastructure. 

The initial setup of this solution is complex. Our environment is not very complex, but the product itself is very complex. It takes a lot of steps to configure.

We used a partner that Cisco recommended to assist us with the implementation. 

We were one of the first implementations, and I think we were used at the lab during our installation. Some of the things that you learn over time were not known, so it could have been done better.

We have seen partial ROI. However, that is probably more our fault than the product's fault because we haven't leveraged the tools that are there.

Three years ago when we were starting with this process, the industry said that software defined networking was the way we had to go. At the time, this is the only solution that was available.

I was one of the proponents of this solution.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to really look at the size of your organization. Ours is kind of in the middle in terms of size, between large and small. So, ACI may be a little bit of overkill for the size of the shop that we have. If you have a large organization then it's a good product. If, on the other hand, you are a little shop, it is probably more than you need.

This is a good solution, but no product is perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco ACI solution is the data center.

This product has improved our organization through automation.

The most valuable feature is the unified fabric.

I recommend to customers that they meet a knowledgeable vendor to help them with it.

Cisco ACI customer service is very good.

Cisco ACI was sold to us. Everybody is using it now.

With the initial setup of Cisco ACI, it is new, so you need to make sure issues pop up. You have to work through those issues. I would like to see included how-to videos.

We went with a consultant, i.e. a third party vendor: HCL. They're very good.

Arista was one of the main alternatives that we evaluated.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate this product at an eight based on everybody else's experiences. It's pretty good. I don't have a full review.

More how-to videos and instructional information is required. We need to simplify it.

We implement customized Cisco ACI for our clients as a networking solution for a variety of purposes.

My organization specifically implements Cisco ACI for other companies, so the product is basically our business model.

For clients, a visible GUI dashboard provides a unified view of the network. In order to do that before, clients may have had to implement multiple tools depending on the structure of the network. Now they can implement one tool and have a unified visual picture of the health of the network.

In a very general way, the ease of access, ease of use, and ease of connecting the system is a valuable feature in itself. The solution doesn't really increase detection rates as that is not what it was created for. Threat prevention comes from other devices that might be connected to the Cisco ACI that monitors external traffic. The ACI solution maintains what end-of-life products would be doing and offers other opportunities to unify solutions.

There has not been a single implementation we have done where the client wants to use all the features that are in the product currently. Contemplating new features seems out of order. Every product can benefit from new features as long as they are desired and add functionality that is useful. Most of the features that are there now are good and Cisco is doing a really good job at staying ahead of the curve with their competition. They are implementing new features before companies are even ready to use them or know that there might be a need for them.

Figuring out how to implement the product for clients is the area we struggle with the most every day. Perhaps an enhancement would be artificially intelligent solutions, but that would be further down the road.

The product itself is very stable. As long as it is deployed with care and solid core objects it will remain stable.

The solution is extremely scalable in ways that pure hardware solutions were incapable of.

I think the customer service is really good. I call Cisco any time and I can usually get someone to help me with whatever I need at whatever time I call.

A portion of Cisco's equipment is going end-of-life. Most of the companies that we implement for are using Cisco Nexus 7K, 5K, 2K so they have 752 implementations and some of their 7K's are going end-of-life. The newer equipment that's becoming available is cheaper. Sometimes Cisco will essentially give it away.

Initial setup can be straightforward or complex depending on who you're implementing the solution for and what they want to do with it. If the client's network is extremely complex, they have a lot of different things that can bring information into and out of their network. Implementation can become significantly more complex as there is more to consider. If the client's network is really simple, then the deployment is straightforward.

We do sometimes experience some issues with integration and in trying to satisfy some of the things that the client wants to do. There are some hidden issues that don't surface until you implement the solution in the network. Some of the issues are client-facing where the client causes the issues. In other words, the issues are not necessarily a problem with the system.

You still have to spend time to try to go through everything and make it work optimally. When you are implementing new features, there's almost always a learning curve if the features are not performing with objects that have already been built.

We are the integrator and reseller, so the implementation is always excellent and the expertise is superior.

I think it has a fairly good time to value. While it takes time to implement, once it's implemented the ability to make changes and adopt new functionality to the system becomes very easy. That saves more money over time because changes are implemented using fewer internal resources.

I've seen some ROI for clients. Clients don't normally share that information with me, but I see how clients have benefited from implemented ACI and how the speed of implementing changes on their network improves over time. The ability to quickly make changes in the network is the biggest benefit that I've seen.

We don't license the products ourselves. The clients that we implement for also license it with Cisco.

As it stands right now, the licensing structure hasn't been fully fleshed out for ACI. So, if Cisco hasn't fully fleshed it out, I'm not sure what the cost is going to be yet.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten. It is a great product, but there are issues with it. It's not perfect and it would have to be to get a ten. The issues that are there are easily mitigated but that also requires effort.

The analytics are pretty good. The built-in dashboard essentially provides analytics out of the box. There are other plug-ins that you can use to make the solution work better for you as a company. You have the option of developing other tools and utilities to use with it because it's an API.

When you are first building the system, it takes longer because you have to build all the objects that you expect to reuse. But because you're building reusable objects it makes adding other functionality easier because of the simple fact that you've already built those reusable objects. When you're doing new things it gets easier.

I think one thing that most people do is avoid reading manuals for anything. Read, read, read and consider doing research. Not all the information you find will be good, but you will discover things you don't know.

Our primary use case for Cisco ACI in our company is to have a central point to manage our network and to do API automation. Those are the two main focuses to automate.

Currently, we're still doing a POC on Cisco ACI. We haven't made the transition. It's a huge jump from what we currently have in our network to the ACI. We're still evaluating it. 

We've already purchased the gear, but we still need more training. We already purchased all the hardware for the production environment. 

We want to keep on training before we make the migration phase.

The most valuable feature of the solution is having a central point to log in. I have a simple dashboard that has all my devices connected. That is what I'm looking for.

For stability, it seems fine. I have no complaints about that.

It's easy to keep adding. You have a set where you just add another leaf to your ACI fabric. 

I can scale quite easily. Just add another leaf to my ACI fabric. It seems straightforward.

I've not used the technical support. I've been working with our Cisco reps and a few professional service providers. They are amazing, number one. 

Their main office is walking distance from my company's office. I can just walk over and complain. It's good having face-to-face relationships.

We are a Cisco shop. Right now, SDN is a buzzword. The next evolution for our company is to have an SDN network. Since we're a Cisco shop, it's ACI.

We've been a Cisco shop since day one.

The initial setup is not straightforward at all. Cisco just released a document that tells you how to set it up, but before that, it was overwhelming. 

To set up, Cisco ACI takes months. There are so many features and you're too scared. They did release a pdf that shows you a step through, i.e. how to set up your ACI fabric. Before that, there's just bare-bones information for something so expensive. It was kind of funny. They just released it.

My complaint about this is: We purchased the ACI gear, but to do monitoring, to do stats, to do telemetry statistics, etc. we have to purchase another product from Cisco. 

I would ask from Cisco when we purchase the hardware if some of these features could be built in the purchase. Now I'm dissatisfied that I have to purchase this to do basic monitoring. It should all be built in.

We did not evaluate other options because we'd have to reevaluate what we currently use for Cisco. None of our staff is trained for anything but Cisco. Cisco was the only product we looked at.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco ACI with a nine. Some of the features should be built in. If you think you know ACI, you don't. Get more training.

Our primary use for Cisco ACI is to separate networks that don't want to talk to each other except for set work.

We are setting up a whole dev environment. Some of us are purchasing separate hardware. We can optimize our existing hardware by realizing ACI.

Cisco ACI can separate networks with a buoy interface. That is the most valuable feature.

I wish that if I had to open up an additional tab, I wouldn't have to log in every single time. That would be a feature I would like.

For the licensing model of the system, I still have not gotten another update after eight months. It's telling me I'm not licensed even though I'm told I am by my reseller.

The stability of the solution looks good. The only roadblock is that it is a big change to Cisco networking.

The scalability of the solution I cannot rate at this time since I just started.

I haven't had to work with Cisco's tech support too much yet. I've been using professional services.

The setup was in the middle. It was straightforward as to what we were doing. Since ACI is a new technology, we had to make sure we didn't start too far apart. I didn't want to break anything. That made it complex.

We used two integrator reseller consultants for the deployment: SHI and BTA. Our experience with them so far is good. Next time, I would want to work with all of the professional services more together.

I wanted an easier way to manage segmentation. Cisco offered this and this is also what the resellers were showing me as well. That this was going to be the future of the system. 

Cisco was the main vendor that I chose. We were also looking at Juniper and HP, but they did not have a similar situation. It was kind of a no-brainer.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco ACI at eight.

If you purchase Cisco ACI, make sure you understand exactly how you're going to put it in because it's not going to be easy to work with.

Our primary use for this solution is in our data center.

This is a modern, next-generation solution, and it is where the platform is going.

I have been told that this is an easy solution to configure, but we are just starting to deploy it, so that is to be determined.

ACI is not simple, by any stretch of the imagination.

We are not following the application-centric approach, but a network-centric approach instead. It would be nice if I could specify network-centric in my design, and the system would organize and set itself up in that way. Essentially, once you go into the GUI for the first time it would prompt you, and it would build out the infrastructure to accommodate your choice.

We have been in a lot of sessions with them and have done a lot of work with it in the lab. We've seen it grow over time. The early versions of the code were buggy and flakey, but as they have gone through newer iterations, we've seen it get better. It is at the point now where were are comfortable with it going into a production data center.

Scalability is definitely something that we're looking at, and it's one of the attractive features of ACI for us. It is easy to do.

The way ACI works is it is one configuration interface. If you want to add more then you just plug it in. I would not call it plug-and-play, but they've made it to the point where it is very close. 

This is important to us because we just don't know how our business is going to grow, and change, over time. It's a moving target for us. If we buy something today, and then there is a demand for more capacity in the data center, then we just have to buy more devices and plug them in. We don't have to do anything else. The infrastructure just becomes available for us to use. This differs considerably from the traditional Cisco, which involved a lot of command lines and configuration.

We have not really dealt with technical support, yet. We are using the Cisco professional services to help us with the design and configuration.

We were using the Cisco 9000 and we reached a point where investment was needed due to depreciation in our infrastructure. We needed to get rid of the old system, and then decide whether to stay with the Cisco 9000 or move to ACI. For us, we decided to employ a hybrid solution that uses both.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty straightforward. It is a plug-and-play type of solution where you can just take it out of the box and connect the wires.

Once this system is in place then it becomes complicated. However, the initial go at it is pretty straightforward, which is nice.

We are using Cisco professional services, as well as a VAR, to help us with the implementation. In order for us to go live, we have to make sure that our VAR is ready to support that.

It is too soon for us to realize ROI.

We're a Cisco shop, so we did not evaluate solutions from other vendors. We already have our partner for purchasing, and all of our relationships were already established. For us, it was simply a design decision between Cisco 9000 and ACI.

We are currently testing this solution in a lab, preparing for our deployment into production.

We are not ready to approach this solution in an application-centric way. It's a great overall architecture, good scalability-wise, easy to configure, and a central configuration, but there are too many knobs to turn.

We were originally going to use ACI for everything. However, after we really started looking at the design and having conversations with our Cisco advanced services team, we saw that it made sense to use a hybrid solution.

My advice for anybody interested in implementing this solution is to have a good look at your data center, your architecture, and importantly your operational and support team. If you have people who are familiar with the traditional way of doing Cisco, and have never touched ACI before, then there is a steep learning curve ahead. The operational team will have to ramp up and be educated. That was definitely a factor for us.

We have a third party operational team, and we had to challenge them. We asked if it was something that they could do, and they needed to prove it to us, first. This was done before we even went into the solution. The number one thing is that you have to be able to support it. If you have only two people installing it, then you're not going to be able to run support 24/7 for when something breaks at three in the morning.

This is a good solution, but I would really like to see the network-centric philosophy of configuration to be a little bit easier. The learning curve is steep. But, being somebody who has been traditional Cisco, iOS, and command line, I can say that this is completely different. It is a complete re-write of everything that you've ever thought of from a networking standpoint. It can simplify your life if you do it right.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I am an engineer who deploys ACI. Most of the deployments cover L2 Out and L3 Out and migrations.

Some of our cloud-based customers integrate it with UCS Director or CloudCenter and are able to automate services. ACI supports automation, like Ansible automation or HTTP automation. It adds stability for cloud-deployment use cases. Cloud-based businesses don't need to create policies. They can do so with an automation orchestration tool like UCS Director or CloudCenter. A few customers are using it this way.

Some other customers are refreshing their data centers with SDN. They have a traditional data center but they want to restructure it. Cisco customers are now going for the Cisco SDN.

The most valuable features include

• microsegmentation
• L3 Out features
• the common tenant and tenancy model.

Regarding microsegmentation, generally, in Layer 2, there are restrictions between VLANs. When you do microsegmentation, by name, by IP address, or MAC address, you can create a microsegmented EPG and you can group within an EPG. Generally, all the endpoints that are part of an EPG can talk to each other. But when you create a microsegmented EPG you are creating restrictions.

Regarding the tenancy model, when you have a host data center and multiple customers and you want to build a dedicated infrastructure for a customer, you have to physically suppress the devices and you have to think a lot about security features. But with ACI, you don't need to buy a dedicated setup for each customer. Using one setup, you can create multiple tenants, and each tenant represents one customer. There are common services that are used by all the customers, like a DNS server or any web servers. You can keep the servers on the common tenant. In that way you can use the tenancy model efficiently.

They are still working on Multi-Site and Multipod but there are many customers that are looking for these in their Features page. 

We are having challenges with these features. For Multipod we need Layer 3 devices that support multicast. Customers ask: "Why can't ACI do that? Why do we need a dedicated Layer 3 device for this?" If they go for Multi-Site there is no need for that, ACI can do it. So Cisco needs to increase the Multipod features in ACI.

For one customer we found CloudCenter doesn't support Cisco Multi-Site scenarios.

I feel the stability is very good. We have had some issues but the support we get from Cisco is always good.

In terms of scalability, you can go with the two-spine and get very good bandwidth, but if you need more than this you can increase the spine count. If you need more devices you can increase the leaf count. Scalability is there.

I have been a bit disappointed with technical support from Cisco. They will often take some time to respond. But once they start they are okay. I feel they need to improve their service.

The initial setup is very straightforward. If you have some basic knowledge you will be able to deploy ACI. Some of the guys feel that it is a little complicated but if they understood tenancy more and the object structure, they would be easily able to deploy ACI.

We can deploy everything in less than two days. The difficulty is that we are working in data centers so we need to look for downtime for the customers. If they are using automation we can deploy everything in a single day. If we are doing manual, it can take three or four days.

But in real scenarios, customers cannot always give us downtime. They tell us to wait for some time and they do migration one by one.

On my team, I am the only one who does deployment. We don't need anybody's help for migration. But we expect a few team members to be involved on the customer's side, people from the server team and the network team, because we need support from them.

Maintenance is very easy. If there are two spines and you are doing an upgrade, you can shut down one spine and do the maintenance. Once that is done you bring up the one you shut down and do the second spine, and similarly for all leaves and all APICs. There is no impact to the server base and zero downtime.

I would rate ACI at ten out of ten. I don't see any bad features in it. I always think about the positive side. I don't see any negativity on the ACI side. There are a lot of features, like automation, that reduce manual efforts that would otherwise be time-consuming.