Cisco ACI Reviews

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.

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.

We use this product at a French hospital. It has helped to improve the data center and we would like to use it to change how we work with clients. 

It has reduced the time it takes to resolve problems and to understand what colleagues want from inside the company.

It simplifies the utilization of the network. 

The first time we used it, it was not stable, but now, a few years later, it's better. Cisco continues to work on this. If anything is not stable, tech helps us. 

It has very good scalability. 

Their technical support is very good. We had a problem and Cisco gave us the best engineer to resolve the issue. 

The initial setup was very complex. It's a new solution and it was very difficult to have an approach for it. With a lot of the help from a Cisco network engineer we had a good approach and are able to easily resolve any problem. 

We used our own company to deploy the network. 

It's expensive but the product is very good. I have never found another partner like Cisco with a solution like this and with great support.

We also looked at Juniper but their solution isn't stable so we didn't go with them. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's a good product, and Cisco has a very good support team and very good network engineers. 

Of course I would recommend this product. We work with Cisco because they have many possibilities to work with very good support. 

We use this product in our services. At this moment, it performs very well.

• It is popular.
• It is simple.
• It works 100 percent of the time.

We would like to have faster services and problem monitoring for our customers.

It is very stable. It works 100 percent of the time. We don't have any problems at the moment.

The scalability is good. At the moment, we are using about 18 percent of the solution. In a few months, when we grow, we should be using more performance of the solution.

This depends on our customers and their change strategy.

The initial set up was complex. 

We are internally integrated. The integration was simple.

We also looked at Juniper and Fortinet.

We chose Cisco because we trust them. Cisco give us a very high level support and technical information.

I would recommend Cisco ACI. This solution is the best.

This solution is used in our data center.

This solution is faster than what we had previously.

The most valuable feature is the data center communication.

I would like to see more troubleshooting apps.

There should be more and better SNMP monitoring.

The stability of this solution is pretty good.

In terms of scalability, this solution is pretty good.

I was not involved in the process of selecting this solution. Rather, I performed the setup.

The initial setup of this solution is semi-difficult. There is a learning curve.

My advice to anybody implementing this solution is to jump in with both feet!

This biggest thing that I learned when using this solution is T-Panel.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

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 case is to interconnect both data centers in my corporation.

The biggest benefit has been that it has improved communication between my endpoints in the data center.

I would like to see better training. I don't have good training with this product. If I did, I probably would be able to solve all of the problems during the installations. 

It's very stable. 

Their technical support is fantastic. Whenever I have a problem, our partners at Cisco support answer quickly.

The initial setup was complex. If I didn't have my partner's support, I probably couldn't deploy Cisco ACI in my data center.

We implemented through a partner. I trust our partner, and I trust any of their recommendations and their deployments.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten. Not a ten because I don't have good training for this solution. I am now implementing Cisco ACI in the company. It's not 100% on the network. It's on 25% approx, more or less.

Our primary use case is for automating our data center. We are moving from a classic legacy data center to new data center, with Cisco UCS. The first implementation will have multiple implementations, then we will move ahead with a Multi-site implementation next year. 

We are still in the development phase.

It improves security and automation. It is stable and provides flexibility with different workloads. It is also more powerful from a security point of view.

The areas for improvement are automation and user-friendliness.

If I lose the connection from one side to the core, I can't use the other side to go to the core. I hope in the future, this will be fixed.

It is very stable.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is complex, because we had to work with Cisco Professional Services to find the correct solution for our implementation.

We directly used Cisco Professional Services for our implementation. They are very professional.

We investigated different products and found that ACI can be used with different workloads (e.g., legacy permits) or with different systems, like Microsoft Hyper-V. Cisco ACI is more flexible as a product.

Pay attention to the implementation and interconnections between the data centers with this product.