Cisco ACI Reviews

I am an assistant vice president. My role involves product management, presales, and delivery of Cisco ACI. We have deployed the solution on-premises and in the cloud. We have different verticals, UIs, and data centers. We consolidate the data center on the basis of region. The data centers are in different regions such as Apex, Europe, and the U.S. Recently, we have MSO connected to Cisco Cloud.

Cisco ACI is an automation requirement where they want to consolidate data centers. We wanted a hybrid Oracle solution where services can be monitored and managed from the cloud and equally can be deployed on-premises. From an application perspective, fifty percent can be moved to the cloud and fifty percent of the on-premises applications cannot be moved due to application restraints.

We use all the features provided by Cisco ACI including orchestration to layer seven, service training, load enhancements, and firewalls.

There are many bug fixes required with Cisco ACI. Whenever there is an issue, we raise it to their tech support and wait for a response. In the meantime, we come up with a version upgrade or patch upgrade so that it can be fixed. One concern we found after 15 days of troubleshooting was a multicasting issue. For many of the applications, we were using multicasting.

It is challenging for people who don't understand the programming language, making it difficult to migrate. With technology, there are two verticals. One is hardware driven and the other is software driven. Most people in our domain understand networking, but they don't understand programming. When we migrate, some programming is required.

I recommend that rather than creating individual stacks we are given some UI-based solutions. This type of functionality would allow us to create a tenant then click on bridge two, and then create it on a VR. Currently, we are using some scripts with help from Postman for migrations from a traditional data center to the cloud.

Over the past six months, I am more interested in the cloud and IoT. From a security perspective, I would recommend Cisco comes up with solutions for ACI and a portal perspective. 

The Apex GUI needs improvement, so end users can follow the proper steps without having to go through the guide, giving more flexibility to the GUI. This will ensure that the user can easily build the configuration.

I have been using Cisco ACI for six years.

Early on, Cisco ACI was not stable. As it matures, it improves. Integration is the biggest challenge with this hybrid solution. From a security perspective, it wasn't stable.

The maintenance of Cisco ACI depends on the project. We use different delivery teams or supporting teams on a project-by-project basis. We handle the delivery and implementation and in the back end, there is a third team that maintains operations.

This solution is scalable. We are system integrators providing solutions to our customers. Approximately fifty percent of our customers are using ACI. 

With experience and after training, the initial setup is not easy. An individual who is going to implement this solution needs some support at the start. 

Deployment depends on how many workloads there are. We migrated more than 300 VMs with the help of tech support. It took three days to complete.

I would rate the ease of setup a three and a half out of five.

We had training and support from Cisco and live enrollment. It was helpful. We followed the initial implementation strategy. It depends on the application structure, what type of application, and how the applications are combined on-premises. The types of services and the type of payment, AD DNS, are also considerations together with security services and how the communication is going to happen between the app and the native services like AD DNS. 

This requires us to work with the application team and complete our homework. We used Excel on a per-application basis. Using Postman, we upload it in the format. Usually, it's a subnet IP schema.

Anyone looking to implement Cisco ACI should look into the cloud features. Ensure you work with the skills you understand, and try to understand some programming to make the job easier. 

I would rate this solution between a seven and an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case for this solution is to use it as our data center backbone. We've got multiple tenants built on it in a network-centric design. We have our Dev\QA Tenant, User Acceptance Tenant, Production Tenant, DMZ, and then UserEdge, where everything basically comes in and goes out. We have Firepower firewalls in-between, but we're basically using Cisco ACI to microsegment between the networks within the tenants. But intra-tenant traffic goes through the firewalls. 

Before we started using Cisco ACI, everything was essentially flat open access. By using ACI, we're able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment. We are basically 99.99% virtual at our data center. There are many features we haven't even started using, but we will get there. 

The features we find most valuable is the integration with the virtual switches of our UCS platform. It gives a lot of visibility right from the ACI console, the ability to channel out the traffic and segment it without having to get into separate physical hardware or trying to figure out VDCs manually. So far that's been really powerful and extremely useful for us.

I think there are a lot of additional features that we haven't had a chance to look at yet, but I would like to see a simpler interface where it is easy to find endpoints and get information about them. Making it more user-friendly would be wonderful. That is my main concern. 

The stability has been good so far. We've got a big project to start doing upgrades on it. But it's been very stable and functioning properly. We haven't really had any issues with it as long as I've been here at the company. I'm sure there were some issues during deployment cause that was before my time. But it's been very stable for me.

In terms of scalability, we haven't grown the deployment yet and we are nowhere near capacity. But it seems like it is relatively scalable in terms of what we could use. It's a matter of what do we need. I just haven't had the opportunity to increase the scale of what we have right now.

The initial setup was fairly complex and it looks terrifying when you first log in. That's one thing about ACI. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but someone who has never worked with anything like ACI, will initially find it difficult to grasp the complexity of it.

We've used a couple of consultants over the last few years. I believe it was BT that helped us with the initial setup, and we're working with Presidio on the upgrade project. As far as I know, the technical support from BT was great. And the people at Presidio know their stuff, they seem to have good plans for where they're going with it. They put together a concrete plan rather than just saying, "Oh, let's just go for it."

I believe there is an ROI. We've been able to streamline our processes dramatically because of the way the new architecture works. So while it was a large investment, I believe that it had a big impact on the general productivity of our systems.

Not many people up in the northeast are familiar with Cisco ACI. It's kind of new and scary, so a lot of people are a little wary of it. Now that I've worked on it for a while, I find it very powerful. Getting direct access into the virtual switches is a huge advantage. I'm not the kind of person who rates nines and tens under many circumstances. So I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My advice to others would be to take a good long look at it. It's great for segmenting your network and doing a little micro-segmentation in your data center. If you're familiar with the Nexus OS and the Nexus hardware platform, you will find that this is the same hardware platform as you would use in a Nexus OS deployment. Also, make sure you get a lot of training as part of your deployment. That would probably be my biggest piece of advice. Make sure that you get educated on how it works and why it was designed the way it was, or what the best practice design is if you're designing it on your own.

The primary use case for ACI in our company is to do data center segmentation to move our network to a zero-trust model. 

This product improved the way our company functions by enabling us to establish our goal of moving to a zero-trust model. That's how Cisco ACI helps us the most.

The most valuable feature at this stage is that it can do segmentation without running everything through a firewall. You're able to do segmentation without having firewalls in the middle of all your connections. It is extendable to other data centers. You can extend your Layer 2 VLANs over Layer 3, using VXLAN.

I would like to see integration with Tetration. You should be able to use Tetration to manage your scripts and push into ACI without having to export, manually manipulate, script it, and then re-import back in ACI. It needs automation there.

It has been very stable. Upgrades have been very easy. We have no real complaints about the stability of the Cisco ACI platform.

The scalability is great. You get more capacity. You can extend it to another data center remotely. 

The technical support for this solution is great. We bought support and it's been going well. 

We knew we needed to switch to another solution because of security concerns. We needed a zero-trust model. 

For our migration approach, we did a very quick migration into it in a network-centric mode. We're starting to move into application-centered mode now. We're still in the migration period.

The initial setup was very complex. It's just a new technology platform. Nobody had training on it. Nobody knew what it was on my team. That makes it complex. 

It's a very complex system, as it should be. It's a new way of thinking about networking. Cisco ACI adds complexity. Cisco ACI is extremely complex. That's not necessarily a complaint, as much as it is a fact.

To deploy Cisco ACI, we used Advanced Services. Our experience with them was fifty-fifty. It's still so new in Cisco that it was difficult for them. We deployed Tetration at the same time and there were a lot of issues there. The engineer they put on the project was great. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product at a seven. It would be a lot higher, but it should have the ability to integrate with Tetration, as was marketed to us. It was a huge downfall for us when they decided not to do that right now. 

I advise anyone to get training before you implement Cisco ACI.

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.

The primary use case is for our data centers. It has performed quite well so far. We interconnected it with our legacy infrastructure. We are now considering moving everything into the new environment, and hoping for the best.

It improved the speed of the daily business. With the preconfigured workflows, daily business task are now done more quickly than in the past. 

Automation is its most valuable feature.

I am still not quite happy with the APIC GUI, since I am more of a CLI guy. I don't really use the GUI a lot. It would be better to introduce some wizards to guide you through the whole configuration process instead of clicking through a bunch of menus with no concrete path. It is too easy to forget one or another if you configure it this way. A wizard would be a great help.

We are still struggling with some design issues, but most of these issues will be fixed in the next release.

The stability has been good so far. We still haven't brought our entire workload into ACI. We just have particular systems running on it, but they are perfectly stable. However, there is still the question mark of what will happen when we bring all our data into the new environment, and If it can carry it.

The scalability has been great. It is very easy to scale. We are quite a big customer, so we had some scalability issues with the older, multi-part environment versions of Cisco products.

The technical support is good. Though, I am not that experience with them, as I try to resolve issues on my own.

We switched to this solution to be able to automize. We were starting to migrate our old legacy network from user campuses, backbones, and data centers into SDN technology, and automation was a requirement for the new solution that we chose.

The setup was quite straightforward. Building the Fabric with the automatic discovery process doesn't require you to do a lot compared to the old legacy networks.

We used Cisco for the deployment.

We have saved time on the provisioning and configuration.

Because of timeline issues, we were focused to use Cisco products and did not consider any other vendors.

If you are still using the finger-defined networking approach, I would recommend trying this solution.

We are happy that spanning tree feature was not included in the new design.

We are an integrator, so we work with the finance, health, and public sectors. We use it to automate the data center infrastructure of our customers. 

• Its provisioning.
• It has the fastest automation. You can move and deploy services in just a couple of minutes. 

Previously, the product was a little tricky to use. However, it's now a well developed platform.

I would like to see the data center unification of Cisco ACI with Cisco DNA into a single platform to deliver the data center and campus sides.

It is very stable. It has 99 percent availability.

It has large scalability. You can deploy a new pod, rack, or service in just a few of minutes instead of hours or days of work. 

The technical support is very good. I don't use them that much because the platform is very robust and well-documented. However, in the past, we needed them a lot, and they were very useful and helpful.

With previous technologies, you had to configure everything by hand: the server, the network, etc. With ACI, you can deploy a service in just a couple of minutes.

The initial feel of it is a little complex. Not everyone can deploy it, but if you know what you are doing, it's very simple from a technician perspective.

My company is the integrator for this solution.

The price could be improved. It is expensive, but then again, it is Cisco. The price is worth what you pay for.

As an integrator, we are using the following vendors:

• Cisco for the networking side.
• VMware for the server side.
• F5 for load balancers.
• NETSCOUT for visibility.

Immediately buy Cisco ACI. It will simplify your work in a way that you can't even imagine until you try it. The product does what it says it will. ACI is a robust, functional platform.

Our primary use case is Multi-site architecture. We run three data centers with Cisco ACI Multi-site, so the interconnections of these three sites are made with ACI.

It has reduced our day-to-day operations by at least half.

• Its simplicity
• It can be automated.

The user interface (UI) should be made easier.

I would like to have a multi-cloud environment, but I just read that Cisco ACI Anywhere is about to be released.

At the moment, the stability is very good. A year and a half ago, sometimes things went wrong with it.

We chose Cisco ACI because of its scalability.

Their technical support is as good as their other products.

We were looking for an automated solution and decided to build from scratch with Cisco ACI.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We used Maticmind, which is an Italian system integrator and Cisco partner. They are very good.

We chose ACI because we have worked with Cisco for a long time and felt that there was no reason to change at the time.

It is a great product. We have not encountered any problems so far. Cisco is very good to work with, and I am really happy with this product.

I would advise to go with Cisco ACI.

We use the solution in our data center.

Virtualization and integration with VMware is the most valuable feature.

The firewall has room for improvement because there is no central inspection yet on Cisco ACI.

I would like more integration with additional security solutions. 

The upgrade cycle has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for four years.

I give the stability an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

We have around 10,000 people in our organization.

The technical support is very good.

Positive

I give the initial setup a five out of ten. The setup is complex moving a data center. The deployment took us six months.

Three people were required for deployment and they are responsible for the low and high-level design as well as the migration.

The implementation was completed with Cisco Professional services.

I give the solution a six out of ten.

The maintenance is performed by Cisco themselves as part of our service plan.

For organizations that are already working with Cisco solutions, it is easy to upgrade to Cisco ACI, but if other vendors are being used I suggest thinking carefully before switching to Cisco because it can become difficult.