Cisco ACI Reviews

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.

The primary use case for Cisco ACI is to migrate a legacy data center, including the new infrastructure.

The product has performed well. 

Automation is its most valuable feature.

The challenging thing about Cisco ACI was we had to put a lot of effort into providing the customer the full picture, new standards, and new technology that they had to use. This was more challenging than deploying the product.

There should be more focus on training and support.

I would like to see is more integration with services and service graphs.

The stability has been good.

The project is pretty small, but from what we have seen, it is scalable.

There have been challenges with the technical support. Though, the product is almost three to four-years-old, there are still things that only a few people can solve. So, Cisco should put more effort into training their people.

The business switched because the legacy way of operating these type of data centers is no longer optimal.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to set up, because our plans for migration were very detailed. We didn't have any problems with it.

We are the partner and the integrator.

It was Cisco ACI vs VMware NSX.

Eventually, the client chose Cisco ACI because they had more experience with Cisco and they still had a lot of physical infrastructure to handle.

It is one of the better solutions in the market right now.

Primary use case is data center software-defined networking. We didn't have this before, so are just moving onto these new products to try to be more efficient with better performance.

It is more scalable than our previous products. 

The product works very well with our virtual environment.

• Telemetry
• Analyzing the environment.

Because this is new technology, which requires a different way of thinking, it can be hard to understand. Therefore, I would like more documentation or education.

It is very stable. It allows us to update firmware on the go without any downtime, which we couldn't do before. Everything is redundant, so if you shutdown one system, then another one takes over.

Its scalability is very good. It is really easy to scale in this product.

I haven't a lot of experience with technical support for this product. My colleague has experience with the technical support and says that they are good.

The old solution was outdated and not scalable. It was difficult to manage in a large scale environment. We do not have many people, so we needed to automate a lot of things. This new product helps us do that.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It has been a new technology for us, so we had  look at the documentation and follow the instructions, which were pretty good.

We used a Cisco partner who was very good, since we didn't know everything about the product from the start.

The pricing is pretty good for new technology.

We only thought about Cisco because they are our primary vendor for network solutions.

Receive education on the new product before you buy it, since it is pretty complex. It is not like the previous products. It has a different way of thinking. However, software-defined networking has a bright future, and it is a good idea to get onboard with it.

The most valuable features of Cisco ACI are the EPGs and the micro segmentation.

I would like to see Cisco ACI become more similar to what SD is, with improvements made to the onboarding on the multiport situation. Currently, it is complicated.

Cisco ACI would benefit by providing the option to integrate easily with DNAC in their next release.

I have been using Cisco ACI for a couple of years.

The solution is stable.

Cisco ACI is scalable and easy to expand. Cisco ACI is a data center concept. We have 1000 servers.

Technical support from Cisco is good. They are knowledgeable. I would rate their customer service and support a five out of five. 

Positive

The initial setup of Cisco ACI is simple.

Cisco ACI is more expensive than Juniper, however, ACI is not the most expensive option.

Prior to choosing Cisco ACI, we evaluated Juniper. 

Overall, I would rate Cisco ACI an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to implement a network overlay. We have a software-defined network in our data center.

Prior to ACI, a network upgrade or network change would be much more complex than it is now. Reducing complexity means that it is faster to make changes.

The most valuable feature is programmability, where we can manage a network via APIs and software, as opposed to having to manage complex hardware.

I would like to see a lot more integrations with the rest of the Cisco portfolio. I would like to have ACI embedded into HyperFlex, as an example.

This solution is very stable now, although it has had hiccups, for sure.

Most of the early struggles with ACI were not that it would go down. Rather, it was more the stability of the management platform, which has improved a lot over time.

This is a highly scalable solution, and we are running it in some really large environments. We have ACI installed in data centers that have more than one hundred leaps, which is thousands of servers.

Technical support for this solution is pretty good.

We've had a few incidents with environment reliability, but getting to the right engineering teams hasn't been difficult.

Our previous solution was legacy, three-tier networking. The market is changing, and software-defined networking is becoming the way to do business. Our network was the last piece to keep up, so it needed investment.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty complex.

The complexity comes about when you migrate from legacy networks into an ACI network. It's a complex process and there aren't tools that make it easy. usually, you're going to build ACI almost band new. Managing it is not complex, but building it is.

We handled the implementation in-house.

ROI would be hard to quantify, but it would come from a network with less downtime, less complexity in changes, and one that is easier to manage.

We evaluated solutions from Cisco, VMware, and HP. Cisco's solution, from a software perspective, may be slightly behind, but from a hardware perspective, it's the most scalable and best to support.

My advice to anybody researching this solution is that you have to test it. You can't take the stats on paper. Rather, you have to actually do the R&D to see it in a real environment. I think a lot of people make the mistake of looking at the features on paper, without actually testing the full functionality.

This is a really strong product. It has been complex, but most of their recent advancements have been in simplification.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for monitoring, automation, links monitoring, configuring of devices, like laptop devices. I use templates and push templates to the devices. We also use it for global software updates.

It has benefited my organization by saving us a lot of time. 

There's a lot of units in the lab and a lot of templates that go to the lab. That is the most valuable feature. 

I would like for ACI to manage all of the devices. 

It's stable. I don't think we have had any downtime or lag. It works fine. 

There's a lot of options with scalability. There's a limit of 1000 devices.

I checked forums and sites. We asked the reseller if Cisco could come in to do a demo. We saw there were some things they could do that we needed in the company so we went with it. 

The setup is okay. The configuration takes a lot of time and we have to prepare the devices to communicate with ACI which took a lot of time. The entire setup took around eight hours. 

We don't use all of the features but it's still worth the money.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Prepare your infrastructure beforehand because once you run the ACI it goes to one device every time and reconfigures it. Prepare the devices before, check their specifications, and then run the ACI. It will help you save your time.

The main purpose is to be a new data center in our company. 

Because of its automation feature, when you configure scripts for Cisco ACI, it reduces human error. It is an easy and quick way to do this.

• It is resilient.
• It is the future solution for data centers.

Sometimes, it has been a bit hard to configure it.

Since it is a new technology, Cisco moved all the menus. This made it tricky to use.

The product is working well. It is stable. However, the solution is a bit big for us to configure.

Before scaling, you have to develop the scripts.

I have not opened a ticket yet, but one of my partners says the support is good.

Our previously solution was Nexus, but I prefer Cisco ACI. I think ACI is the better solution.

I wasn't a part of the setup, but it was straightforward and easy.

We used our partner to develop the ACI in our company. They were really good and have good engineers with a good experience.

This is another way to configure your network solution. Be open-minded about it.

My primary use case is for server deployment automation.

There is no need to configure all the switches, you can configure them from the device controller.

In day-to-day activity, it creates an installer for a particular VLAN to be implemented. 

Also, I don't need to monitor everything, login to every switch. I can monitor them centrally.

There are many features which are useful, like the automatic completion of the VXLAN. We don't need to configure any part of the VXLAN, which is tedious to do.

They should improve the GUI, make it simpler. They also need to improve its integration with other automation tools.

In terms of additional features, I would recommend of PTP support, which they have yet to come out with.

Right now it's stable. We haven't had to create any support issues. When doing the implementation, support was quite useful where, if somebody made a wrong connection to some other part of the network, the wrong port, they were able to track it and solve it. But in day-to-day operations, we haven't had any issues.

The scalability is very good, based on the spine-leaf structure. You can increase the number of leaves and you can also scale the spines. You can deploy four spines, eight spines.

There have not been that many hard, critical issues. There were some minor issues which were handled by technical support efficiently, but there have been no critical issues up until now.

We did not have a previous solution. We had a traditional network.

One of the reasons we looked at ACI was that the traditional network was going end-of-support. At that time we had to decide whether to go with the traditional approach or to go with SDN, which is the future, where we can do automation. 

ACI also has many benefits that network guys can make use of. We could not get that type of visibility: where the VMs are connected and which switches are connected. We didn't have that visibility. Now we can have that visibility into the virtual part as well. Also, if you want to trace a packet, there is a feature that helps troubleshoot.

The visibility helps us identify if the server is connected to the wrong feed or wrong LAN. We can immediately try to identify what the issue is, or if packets are being dropped.

For new users it has particularly new concepts, so people have to digest the implementation part and the regular use, the day-to-day operations. But once you're familiar with it, once the concepts are clear, it's quite easy to go on with day-to-day operations.

Laying the fabric-building and the policy for usage, with four spines and three controllers, can be done within a day. But the mapping and other operations take about a week, to complete the entire fabric with the proper testing and implementation.

In terms of implementation strategy, we have done two deployments. In the first, we had time to study what they were using, what VLANs, what the other requirements were. Migrating from legacy to ACI takes time. The main challenge is configuring ACI applications for visibility. It takes time to learn the traffic and then map the policies to ACI.

Day-to-day for maintenance, we have one or two people who work together in shifts, they're able to manage things.

For one of the setups we used Cisco support, which was very helpful. They have a good core team which provided us support. Cisco's team had three people on the ground. Our team consisted of two or three people for the implementation.

We evaluated VMware NSX. When we compared the technical solution of ACI and NSX, how the traffic flows from physical to virtual and virtual to physical, there were many parameters which we compared, some of which were critical.

Know exactly what you are looking for and what workloads there are. If your company has workloads based on virtualization of VMware, you should know how many physical machines there are and how many virtual machines there are. Also, you need an idea of the kind of costs you can pay for deploying the infrastructure. Look into the support, the documentation, how it would work for troubleshooting. All those things matter. Also, look at the company's relationships with the OEMs, what kind of partnership they have, what kind of support the OEMs can provide.

We have two locations where people use Cisco ACI. One has about eight to ten people for support, and the other location has seven to eight people. All are network support staff.

Once an implementation is done, it's regular day-to-day operations. If anything new comes up, new VLANs, we'll handle it. There are things in our pipeline where we are planning to have ACI deployed in our remaining data centers.