Cisco ACI Reviews

We are switching the Nexus line to ACI for our customer: the server, firewall, etc.

We will improve our organization using the automation.

• Its resilience
• It easy to configure.

They need more documentation. Because when we hit an issue and searched on Google, we didn't find a lot of documents about the issue. Possibly because it's a new product.

We are deploying ACI, and at same time, we are testing migration from our old network. Our old next is Nexus, latest version, and we have a less load balancing and it's hard to migrate. We are hitting some issues, so maybe there is room for improvement.

It is to early to evaluate the stability.

The scalability is okay. We are deploying the leaf switches one-to-one.

The technical support is okay. We have been looking into some issues with our legacy network when migrating our ACI. While the tech support has responded well, we are still waiting for some more information.

We were having some issues with our network, so we took some advice from Cisco regarding that product, and looked for another product to replace it.

We deployed a lot of Fabrics to multiple sites, which was a bit complex.

We only worked directly with Cisco's IT, and they provide some consultants onsite to help us.

Cisco ACI is a good solution, but Cisco needs to test all the networks before doing a migration.

Right now, we are using ACI Fabric to replace legacy equipment.

The customer is in a phase where they are building all the Fabric and moving everything. Therefore, it is early to discuss the use case. In the short-term, they plan to use ACI Fabric  to replace everything (their entire infrastructure) that they have at the moment. 

You can do a lot of things with it because it is a very flexible solution.

There is quite a learning curve at the beginning.

I haven't seen any major issues with stability.

The scalability is great. This is the greatest feature of the technology. It is a great improvement in scaling out. It can greatly increase the overall scalability of the Fabric with multi-port and multi side, making it a great product.

There is a dedicated support team inside the Cisco, except (instead of them) we are doing all the day-to-day, standard support activities for our customers.

The ACI setup is in its initial phases is difficult. The learning curve at the beginning is higher than a normal setup. However, there is a point in which you have all your objects setup,  policy, etc., then you can reuse them, which is faster compared with a more traditional software, e.g., Nexus 7000 or Catalyst. Once you overcome the learning curve, you can move on with the rest of it.

Cisco ACI is a good solution, so I would recommend it.

My clients use Cisco ACI for multi-site connectivity. They can use it to deploy multiple data centers and can manage the entire network from Cisco ACI Multi-Site.

I like features like policy control and micro-segmentation.

Quality Assurance could be better, and there are a lot of bugs in each release. We discover these bugs when we upgrade the ACI environment, sometimes resulting in downtime. 

In the next release, I would like to be able to manage hybrid cloud networking. So currently, if you have an ACI environment running on-premise or Epic in the cloud, we can handle it with the NexSys dashboard. But if Cisco can integrate SD WAN-related features, through which we can do multi-cloud networking, that will be an awesome feature. It should be more flexible.

I have been using Cisco ACI for more than five years.

Cisco ACI could be more stable. Bugs create performance issues.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a six.

Cisco ACI is a scalable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability a ten.

My experience with technical support depends on the region. For example, technical support is excellent if it's an engineer from the EMEA, like Belgium. But we struggle to connect with good engineers in the APAC region.

Positive

It takes about a week to deploy this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give the initial setup an eight.

We deploy this solution for our customers.

There are no additional costs. We only have to pay for a support contract apart from the license.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give pricing a seven.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco ACI an eight.

• Qatar Rail: network and data center infrastructure
• Msheireb Downtown: smart city project including infrastructure for Big Data
• Ministry of Interior: network design based on Qatar Rail's passive infrastructure.

ACI provides network ability to deploy and respond to the needs of applications, both in the data center and in the cloud.

The ACI fabric supports more than 64,000 dedicated tenant networks. A single fabric can support more than one million IPv4/IPv6 endpoints, more than 64,000 tenants, and more than 200,000 10G ports. 

The ACI fabric enables any service (physical or virtual) anywhere with no need for additional software or hardware gateways to connect between the physical and virtual services and normalizes encapsulations for virtual extensible local area network (VXLAN)/VLAN/network virtualization using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE).

• Security and isolation based on the type of traffic

• High level of resiliency.

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.

We have two clusters, the first one of which I upgraded last week to version 4.6, with the main cluster being, at the moment, 4.2. 

We are talking about simple things with which we use the solution, such as employing Cisco firewalls for protecting or managing some of the data. 

I actually managed a huge and very complicated corporate network, it being separated in many locations. We have i1 solutions and outstations which are all connected to our network. My primary focus nowadays is on our communication, on the head office network. 

We have a perimeter firewall when it comes to the hub, which is responsible for outbound and inbound traffic, in respect of the public services for outbound customers and outbound internet traffic for the internal RJ customers.

Our current H firewall is Fortinet, being the 3000 D series. 

There is a separation into five Vdoms, or virtual domains, which themselves are separated into a data center, firewall, VBN, publishing services, and proxy as a proxy firewall.

Routing mythology comes into play. At the moment, we have our AS number and BGP configuration with many service providers for the purpose of maintaining high availability and redundancy. So too, the Fortinet firewall is working in high availability mode.

When it comes to security, we recently switched to Fortinet, as we feel it to be more customizable for our use case in RJ than the solution. We moved because Cisco scored lower than Fortinet. 

While we have seen a return on our investment in certain cases, we have, of late, faced issues on the Call Manager, which we have. 

We have an on-premises, resistant license which we invested in. Out of nowhere, Cisco changed the licensing module to that of smart licensing, a perpetual license state, without offering any compensation to the customers. 

This made the license worthless and forced us to subscribe for smart licensing. This is the only way to continue receiving active support and upgrades from Cisco, not that anyone would say anything otherwise. 

Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing. For half the cost, I can obtain the same service with another product. 

It would be great if ACI would include the next generation firewall feature. 

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten, owing to the issue of the price and the complexity involved in its maintenance. 

I have been working with Cisco ACI for around five years. I have definitely worked with it in the past 12 months. 

The solution is definitely stable. 

The scalability is okay. 

Cisco technical support is great. 

In the past, I used Fortinet, Cisco ASA and Meraki. Currently, I use Cisco ASA and Fortinet. 

When it comes to security, we recently switched to Fortinet, as we feel it to be more customizable for our use case in RJ than the solution. We moved because Cisco scored lower than Fortinet.

When it comes to the installation, it is important to keep in mind that we are a corporate enterprise, which means that the complexity and customization are there. Many locations must be connected with each other. There is a need to apply many routing protocols, including EIGRB, static, and BGP. We have many protected areas in the backbone. 

In the middle are data center firewalls, which lie between the user and core switches. We also manage the wireless access. There is also Cisco Identity Service Engine, which manages access to the internet using authentication and posturing, based on the configured policies.

Much staff is needed for maintenance. This varies with the work payload. 

While we have seen a return on our investment in certain cases, we have, of late, faced issues on the Call Manager, which we have.

We have an on-premises, resistant license which we invested in. Out of nowhere, Cisco changed the licensing module to that of smart licensing, a perpetual license state, without offering any compensation to the the customers.

This made the license worthless and forced us to subscribe for smart licensing. This is the only way to continue receiving active support and upgrades from Cisco, not that anyone would say anything were I to stop. The licensing issue contributes to my decision to rate the solution as an eight out of ten. 

Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing. For half the cost, I can obtain the same service with another product.

We are talking about the cost of the renewal. 

Cisco solution is a perfect product and considered number one in the world in many parts.

Cisco ACI is a great product. It's nice to have in the company.

I am the network administrator in the enterprise company.

I rate Cisco ACI as an eight out of ten. 

The primary use case was to implement SDN in the data center to bring new technology for the application team.

We had different networks and combined them with ACI so we could have the control of one controller-based network. Also, everything is combined now. Automation is running so that the operational effort was reduct massivley.

We have the flexibility to bring an application from wherever it is located from one end of application to the other. It has overlay at the end.

I don't like the idea that Cisco is bringing in different machines or dashboards. This does not allow us to have one solution. We are viewing the DNA Center, ACI, and Meraki. A link from another system may have you end up in the Meraki dashboard, that's not what I expect. I want to have one single pane of glass where I can see and do the changes on every thing.

I would like to be able to test the upgrades in a simulation before implementing them in production because not everyone has a lab.

Nexus Dashboard could bring us a hugh step forward to become more felxible and agile.

2,5 years

In the beginning, the stability was not that good. However, the code now seems to be stable.

We like its scalability because we have use its paths to bring all the networks into ACI. Therefore, we need to be able to scale.

I like the technical support. It is great. We have a good team on the other end of the line. We also have good support from our sales engineer (SE).

We started with Cisco solutions and are now switching to ACI, which is the new solution. If it doesn't work how I expect, I will consider exchanging it.

The initial setup is straightforward, as it has a network-centric approach.

I joined the team after they did the integration, but I know that they bought the starter kit from Cisco. Our company had a lot of issues with the starter kit.

Once you sign for the start kit implementation, you have to go all the way through to the implementation, even if you are experiences issues.

I do not know who was on the shortlist.

For me, Cisco is the best solution.

I would tell someone considering this solution to talk to an account manager from Cisco and some technical people. Then, go to a Cisco conference and discuss the product with people, e.g., ask them how they did the implementation. 

It has helped to improve our organization in the automation front. We integrated it with vCenter and Microsoft Hyper-V. 

Currently, we are not on the cloud. We have a private cloud deployment.

The most valuable features are the automation with the different systems for the software development and the ability to provision switches in hours rather than days.

Automation is the main criteria why we chose to go with this solution.

Cisco ACI needs to add more analytics and automation. 

It is stable but we have faced some problems with troubleshooting. 

There are no issues with scalability. We can easily scale. 

The solution's technical support is good. They help us with the operations. 

We decided to go with this product because the Cisco solution had hardware and software built-in. VMware is in the virtual world and so we went with the hardware and the software in the same box.

The initial set up was complex. We had to deploy 120 leads. Migrating from Legacy Cisco network to ACI was complex. 

We also looked at VMware. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco ACI an eight. The reason is that troubleshooting has been a concern. When there is a problem, the downtime increases. 

Cisco ACI is a good product. If you're looking for automation, you should go for it.