Cisco ACI Reviews

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 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.

The primary use case is for data center switching. This is what it was intended to do.

I am a partner, and I implement the solution for other organizations.

• It scales very well. When you increasingly scale with it, it makes the product easier to work with.
• You can automate it.
• It has a lot of insight into monitoring and traffic. However, this could also be improved.
  

The interface is sometimes slow. I receive a lot of weird errors when I try to install apps, such as contract apps, which should give me a nice visualization of all the contracts. However, it just doesn't load, etc.

I would like more thought put into the way the graphic part of the monitoring is rendered. When you have a lot of contracts, you can't understand the graphics because they are so loaded.

The solution is stable. I haven't seen it crash.

While I haven't done big installs, it does seem like it would scale well.

I haven't used the technical support.

This is a client decision on whether to switch.

The initial setup isn't straightforward, but it is manageable. 

We are the integrator for our customers. The installation is straightforward.

I am an implementer, not user, of the solution. Therefore, ROI is not applicable.

We were only considering Cisco. ACI is such a complex solution that I am not sure that are any competitors which can match the product's complexity.

Go for this solution.

This is software-defined networking. So, all the configuration done on a customer network is done with this application.

I am using the version before the latest version.

It is very easy to do the configuration after you know how to work with the product. It is global, so you change one interface, and changes are reflected on every switch.

Its graphical user interface (GUI) is not as user-friendly as it could be.

It is quite expensive.

I have been using this solution for about a month.

It is stable and reliable.

It is quite scalable. It is one of the most scalable products we have come across.

We have five people who are using it in our company in Portugal.

We haven't had any need.

We were using a different solution, but it was not for software-defined networking. It was for a different type of networking.

It is very complex. All the configuration that needs to be done on the Cisco ACI is very complex. We have to create base policies for all the network devices and then implement it. Afterward, it is rather easy, but the implementation part is a long and complex process.

After it is deployed, it is rather easy because all the configuration is done automatically. You only need to do regular visits to see that it is working and do some regular tests. It is not that difficult.

We took Cisco's help.

It is quite expensive. It is not at all on the cheap or medium side.

I am quite new to this product, and I am still learning it. My recommendation would depend upon the size of the organization. It is one of the flagship products of Cisco, but it is not a product that you can implement for any customer. It is more suitable for medium to large enterprises.

I would rate Cisco ACI an eight out of 10.

I am a technology consultant and my company is implementing this product for data center networking.

The most valuable feature is the throughput that it offers.

Training for this product is available from institutions but it is not available online where you can get users trained easily. It would be better if the training for our users was easier to get.

Cisco ACI should have better integration with a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or KVM. This would give us a one-window solution for our networking, compute, and storage.

I have been working with Cisco ACI for about two years.

Our customers are very much satisfied with the stability. We do not have any issues with it.

It is scalable, although it depends on the design and the customer.

This is not a product for small-scale users. If we have customers with large data center requirements, we offer them Cisco ACI. For example, it is not for small enterprises without a lot of services running in their data center.

Scaling is easy because we can add, as required. While it depends on the design, scalability is not normally an issue.

We have received technical support when required and we are pretty satisfied with the support we get.

The initial setup is okay. It is not very complex, although I would not say it is very user-friendly because it is different from what we have been using. The best way to put it is that for me, it is new and it is straightforward.

A complete deployment, including the migration from their existing system, will take approximately two months.

Initially, we had Professional Services assist with hour deployment.

This is an expensive solution.

Overall, this is a good product but if it had better integration then I would rate it a full ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

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.