Cisco ACI Reviews

We use Cisco ACI in the data center

You can integrate Cisco ACI well with VMware. 

I've been using Cisco ACI for about two years. 

So far, Cisco ACI's stability has been good because they use the Nexus hardware but with different software. 

The scalability depends on the hardware performance. Most of vendors use the traditional chip such as Broadcom , so I suppose the performance and scalability of ACI switches are the same as other competitors. 

Cisco support is way better than the competition in my experience. I can rate them five out of five.

Like most SDN solutions, Cisco ACI is easy to deploy. 

I rate Cisco ACI eight out of 10. Cisco ACI is a highly complex solution. The initial deployment is just a few clicks, but understanding how an ACI works and interacts with routing, switching, and virtualization takes a lot of knowledge. The interface isn't necessarily hard to use, but the technology concepts is complicated. If you want to understand deep dive how it works and how it integrate together , you should study hard. Other SDN solutions like Juniper IP Fabric are more straightforward. ACI is more complex in terms of the concept.

I am an implementer. Whenever a customer purchases this solution, I go on-site and deploy it for them.

From my point of view, troubleshooting issues relating to ACI can be a little bit complicated to perform.

I have been using Cisco ACI for roughly six months.

This solution is both scalable and stable.

Cisco's technical support team is very good.

If you know the steps, then the initial setup is quite straightforward. You need to know how to configure it. You're looking at a minimum of at least five working days to build the infrastructure. After that, it depends on how many devices you want to connect.

I don't believe there is any licensing required.

Normally ACI is implemented in the data-center — It's not an end-user product.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

There are some issues regarding the orchestration of vendors and integration that need to be addressed.

It's fully-integrated into vCenter, so we can see everything, like vMotion, and can manage fully with vCenter, as well as manage the whole network.

• It's essential for a software defined network.
• Automated systems
• Helps to defend policies that we've created
• Good for automation

It's very new, so there's lots of bugs, and it's only good for testing with PoC customers. We're the first Canadian customers for this product.

Infrastructure and logic should have a better connection. There's too much linkage and it's easy for people to get lost.

No issues with deployment.

Again, it has lots of bugs as we're the first Canadian company for which it's been used.

The scalability is very good, as the controller automatically detects new additions and scales itself. It's agile because it's a cloud-based network.

We've used it a lot, and someone is always available because our employer is the first customer in Canada.

It's complex, and you must go through training.

Look to similar products depending on your budget. Remember, this is in the early stages, so it's still evolving. Be sure to get training for implementation and deployment.

It is a progressive tool. You can automate things with it. It is for a new generation of data centers.

The previous generation of networking, everything was slow, taking days to deploy and run a script. With Cisco ACI, I can deploy things with a script, then run it in five minutes.

• Automation
• Developing

Cisco should provide more examples of code in their website. Something that other people can use. There is a great place in the development area.

The stability is not bad, but could be improved. In the beginning, we had integration problems, but now, it is more stable.

There is a scalability path on the Cisco website. We are currently working on scaling the product.

Cisco has a powerful technical team, which is very useful for us.

The initial setup was complex.

We used an international company for the deployment. My colleagues were very happy with them. The deployment happened before I joined the company.

The thing that I like the most from Cisco is the support and all the documentation that they have. We do have to pay for it though.

We also considered Juniper.

I would recommend Cisco ACI.

It is used in data centers.

It gives us a new way of providing the network.

Building the ACI Fabric is its most valuable feature. 

It needs to be able to function on the cloud.

I am not using it day-to-day at the moment. My impression is it is working fine.

On paper, it scales.

We did the deployment.

Start now with this technology.

The primary use case for this product is to enhance the speed of certain tasks in the network. We get faster deployments of network policies based on applications that we need to provide.

The centralized management of the entire network data center, in this case with ACI, is the most valuable feature. By having access to some powerful APIs you can build your own tool to speak to the ACI controller, then with that, you can deploy things really fast. Having the option to build your own tools and then using the centralized management of the ACI to push the configuration to the network devices is very valuable.

The error messages should be improved. Sometimes we want to remove an error message so we acknowledge an error and we would then like to remove it but there's no real way of doing that. If we need to do it, we need to open a tech case. That could use improvement. 

From my experience, it seems like a really stable product. The only thing that concerns me a bit is the fact that you have a lot of errors. It gives you a lot of error messages and they mostly don't really influence the functionality, so it still works. It just notifies that there is some misconfiguration and I think it will scare people with these kinds of messages that don't really have an influence on the functions. Operating the ACI fabric is a concern I have. 

I have seen the guide for scalability and I think it's great. I have no complaints. 

We had some problems so we opened a tech case and we got help. We could do the things we couldn't do so their support is great.

Everyone is getting faster and if you want to compete with other companies then you have to bring services to your customers that are at the level of the other companies. ACI is a way of doing things faster by automating. That's the reason why we have it in our company. We chose Cisco because it was based on certain conditions that had to be met, and of course, also because of the price. It was the best product in terms of price and what comes with it.

At first, the setup was really complex because we did everything with the GUI first. We had to figure out how to do that and it was frustrating because we had a lot of errors which didn't really tell us anything because we're used to other kinds of messages from the old school networking. That was kind of frustrating but then once we got it, it got easier. Now, there are new challenges that we are facing when we want to do certain configurations but it totally gets better with the help of online communities.

We have someone coming from Cisco once a week. We ask him questions and he helps us integrate this new technology in our company.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the error messages. In order to get to a ten, they need to have a better way of telling if something is really important. They shouldn't have the message in the same window or in the same menu, they should be separated. The guys who looks at it should be able to tell really fast if it's a problem they have to look at right away or if it has time. Also, they should have the option to delete the messages if you acknowledge them and don't want to see them anymore. 

Advice I would give to someone considering this solution would be don't be too frustrated about trying to do certain things because it needs time and you need to learn the GUI and what it does in the background. Take the time and ask the community or ask a Cisco employee to help you integrate and then with time it will get better.  

We are putting ACI into replace the customer's legacy networks, so it's a migration project. 

We have been able to deploy new applications more efficiently and faster. 

We can support policy based on our intent, then that gets rendered into the policy that we will be using for Fabric.

It is more about resolving bugs early on in the code. Otherwise, as the product gets more mature and those bugs get discovered sometimes by the customer, then Cisco will resolve them.

It is pretty good once it is in, then up and running. The stability is fine. I haven't had many issues.

The product is scalable. You can scale east-west by adding in additional leaf switches. I haven't experienced any scale issues so far, which is good.

The technical support is good. We have Cisco SEs assigned to this project, and we have used them. They are pretty responsive. We have been happy with them. 

That decision would have been made by the customer internally, but they would do a LAN upgrade and an RFP. In this case, Cisco ACI came out as the winner.

It took quite a bit of time to get the design completed in advance. However, once the core ACI Fabric was in and migrated on, the initial setup is fairly easy. It's the same with any new deployment.

We are the supplier to the customer and the Cisco partner. We are actually doing the implementation, and the customer hired us to do it.

It saves time and resources.

The only real competitor to this product is VMware NSX.

We have purchased this solution for our network, but we have not deployed it yet.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the Call Manager.

Technical support needs improvement. I can get stuck with a rep who will just have me scan the logs to look for the problem. I think that technical support tickets should be escalated sooner. 

This solution is pretty stable.

I would rate the scalability about a ten.

Sometimes I get stuck with somebody from technical support who does not understand the problem. If they are having trouble then they need to get help with it more quickly.

We are still in the pre-deployment stage of this solution.

The only complaint that I have so far is in regards to technical support.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.