Cisco ACI Reviews

We are using it for application centric infrastructure (ACI). It is the evolution of the current data center setup from the legacy design to something programmable with some automation features which are missing today. The key challenge is to set up a new data center, then move all the legacy stuff into the new design. 

We need to understand how to do it, as are already under way. We already have products, but we need to go farther in the design and development of the platform.

Financially, it should be an improvement because we expect everything will converge in the tool. Therefore, we can change the way that we invest money in resources. Today, we have to keep a very wide range of skill resources in the company. Going forward, we will be able to focus in more specific skills that will allow us to keep the new tool up and running. It's a big change of approach, but in the long run, it will provide us a lot of benefits. The benefit is the finance of our IT will change.

Once we have it running, it should be easier for us to program our IT rather than going case-by-case, by switches and different elements, or program it by hand. 

Interoperability with third-party products always seems so straightforward, but every time you need to invest a lot to add an external element to the ACI Fabric technology. A good improvement would be to have an easier integration with external building blocks in the customer's environment.

Biannually, there is a new design delivered by Cisco. Thus, you are always running behind the new design, and it never stops. With Cisco ACI, this has been a nightmare. I recommend that they provide more customer focused blueprints to fix this. They should try to learn and understand what are the real needs of each customer.

Now, we are running behind releases. However, with each new release of a new design, you have to test it and validate it. So, we aren't going operational, which is not good. This support was not offered to us with the product.

I would not want to see any additional features at this point. We have had enough additional features. We still have a lot to learn and don't want anything extra.

The hardware is not stable. We have switches failing.

We are not that big to reach the limit (or edges) of this technology. Its scalability is fine. It is very easy to scale. 

Today, doing changes to the infrastructure is a nightmare. Every single device has different programs and programmatics. However, with this tool, you simply plug and play. When you want to scale, you add one piece, and it's done. It works.

We are buying support services from a Cisco partner, and they have not always worked perfectly. Sometimes, we have to open many types of tickets. We have to make them very clear what we need and just exclusively ask them to forward a request to Cisco. Once we get to Cisco, the support works.

Since the product is new, it is difficult to get the partners onboard. Other companies are not able to provide effective support for this technology yet.

We switched to ACI because there came a time to make the decision to either stay with another 10 years with the technology that we had in place or go through this challenge and bet on the future with better, new technologies (and also new skill sets and new setups for our teams). We also try to resell internally to our internal customers and other departments. We help them find new ways to facilitate their core business. We do IT for them, so they need the best possible solutions from us to make their lives easier.

Today, it is sort of a nightmare for them too. Every time we have to do maintenance, for instance, on the infrastructure, we have to break their business continuity, which is not always good.

The initial setup was easy. At the time that we did our setup, the design was easy. The original design was easy to set up. Then, Cisco changed it, and it was more complex. They should not have changed it.

Cisco's partner did the implementation. The experience was great. They came and helped us to do a zero day setup. In a few weeks, we were up and running with the pro console.

The business case is not a complete success today, because we still have the two environments running. We want to switch down the first environment while we have everything up and running on the new one, but it's taking ages. This is a big challenge.

We bought a package for hardware, software, and support. At that time, Cisco was simply selling that package to distributors, then we opted for it directly.

VMware is one of ACI's competitors. We considered VMware because we also have it in our infrastructure.

We chose Cisco ACI, because VMware is just focusing virtual infrastructure and microsegmentation. The idea was to use Cisco for the physical infrastructure and integrate with VMware for the virtual infrastructure.

I would recommend the solution to anyone with a similar use case, though try for a greenfield solution or project instead of migrating your previous infrastructure.

In principle, what we are looking for is to have one gigantic tool which can be programmable, making our lives easier in terms of troubleshooting and management.

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.

My customers use Cisco ACI to replace the legacy networks that they have. Most of the time, however, they don't seem to be using the functionalities that are specific to ACI. They just use the base consumer functionalities similar to what they were using in the old solution.

One of the most valuable features is centralized management. The other is the ability to create policies by routing.

The learning curve is long. It's very difficult to learn Cisco ACI. As a result, our customers usually have difficulty working with this solution.

I started working with Cisco ACI about two years ago.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

They have good technical support, and I would give them an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment is not difficult, but the migration from old networks to Cisco API is not easy. However, migrations are usually not easy.

If I were to rate the deployment on a scale from one to five with one being the most difficult and five being the easiest, I'd give it a two.

It's not difficult to maintain, but it's difficult to learn how to maintain it. Once you learn it, however, it's easy to maintain.

You should spend a lot of time learning the solution. I recommend Cisco ACI because right now, there is no other solution like it. It's a good solution with central management, and I would give it a rating of seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco ACI solution is the data center.

This product has improved our organization through automation.

The most valuable feature is the unified fabric.

I recommend to customers that they meet a knowledgeable vendor to help them with it.

Cisco ACI customer service is very good.

Cisco ACI was sold to us. Everybody is using it now.

With the initial setup of Cisco ACI, it is new, so you need to make sure issues pop up. You have to work through those issues. I would like to see included how-to videos.

We went with a consultant, i.e. a third party vendor: HCL. They're very good.

Arista was one of the main alternatives that we evaluated.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate this product at an eight based on everybody else's experiences. It's pretty good. I don't have a full review.

More how-to videos and instructional information is required. We need to simplify it.

We're planning to use it as a product to sell to our customers. We are in the business of service integration. We offer solutions for our customers. We have specific customers who have a use for ACI because of the microsegmentation. They have five regional offices which all have five different people who are responsible for managing their site so we are trying to unite them and put everything under one roof and have a single place of control and visibility of the full network specifically for their data center.

Now, our customers have tiers of management that have meetings with about the simplest tasks because it has to be approved from upper management and senior management and by the time it gets to the engineer that's going to deploy it, it takes way too long. With the solution, they can delegate a person who would be in charge of running the ACI as a whole, and it will be much faster because it doesn't have to go through the whole chain of command for the simple task of deploying one little machine on one port in the data center.

It eases our deployment. Now, we use service requests when there's a project and we have to deploy it. So when the networking team gets a service request it'll be two clicks, anyone can do it. It will be less of a job, and it will be easier and faster. The main benefit is the simplicity of the deployment. On the flipside, it's also a drawback because if only one person does it and if he does something wrong, the whole system can stop working. If ten people are doing ten different things and one person messes up, it's only one error and it's easier to isolate the problem and fix it. A customer is going to deploy something on their own and more often than not, they don't have the knowledge and experience to understand what can go wrong, so they might accidentally clog the network.

If I was a customer who is using the ACI to run my network, I would like for there to be more information about it available. While using the ACI in the graphical interface, I would like if there was something that explained every step that you can click and it will tell you what you are doing in more detail. For me, I understand what's happening because I did a course, but the problem will be when our customers, who are not so versatile in this, start using it and won't know what's going on. If it works it's fine, but when they run into problems, then it's gonna be an issue. If everything works, it should be fine but if any issues come up, a lot of Cisco services will be needed.

The scalability is impressive. I think the best thing about that is the vendor-agnostic part. In the lab, we did a VMware deployment from what I heard it doesn't matter how the VM is deployed, it can integrate with ACI and you can manage it from the Epic controller.

In the lab environment, we had a setup rebuilt, it was their virtual environment. It was a small deployment. Four switches in total, two leaf and two spine switches, and three controllers. From my past experiences with those types of deployments, the setup shouldn't be an issue. The natural connectivity between them and six switches should be easy. From the controller itself, the deployment of the overlay is pretty straightforward and simple.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I would advise a colleague to definitely try it. Mess around with it, test it as much as possible because it's a new solution. It's different from the traditional data center deployment so there's not a lot of internet posts about it in which you could go and Google and find out more information. The chances that someone has had your problem before and probably found a solution for it are slim so you might get stuck and you will have to go straight to Cisco.

The primary use case for ACI in our company is to do data center segmentation to move our network to a zero-trust model. 

This product improved the way our company functions by enabling us to establish our goal of moving to a zero-trust model. That's how Cisco ACI helps us the most.

The most valuable feature at this stage is that it can do segmentation without running everything through a firewall. You're able to do segmentation without having firewalls in the middle of all your connections. It is extendable to other data centers. You can extend your Layer 2 VLANs over Layer 3, using VXLAN.

I would like to see integration with Tetration. You should be able to use Tetration to manage your scripts and push into ACI without having to export, manually manipulate, script it, and then re-import back in ACI. It needs automation there.

It has been very stable. Upgrades have been very easy. We have no real complaints about the stability of the Cisco ACI platform.

The scalability is great. You get more capacity. You can extend it to another data center remotely. 

The technical support for this solution is great. We bought support and it's been going well. 

We knew we needed to switch to another solution because of security concerns. We needed a zero-trust model. 

For our migration approach, we did a very quick migration into it in a network-centric mode. We're starting to move into application-centered mode now. We're still in the migration period.

The initial setup was very complex. It's just a new technology platform. Nobody had training on it. Nobody knew what it was on my team. That makes it complex. 

It's a very complex system, as it should be. It's a new way of thinking about networking. Cisco ACI adds complexity. Cisco ACI is extremely complex. That's not necessarily a complaint, as much as it is a fact.

To deploy Cisco ACI, we used Advanced Services. Our experience with them was fifty-fifty. It's still so new in Cisco that it was difficult for them. We deployed Tetration at the same time and there were a lot of issues there. The engineer they put on the project was great. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product at a seven. It would be a lot higher, but it should have the ability to integrate with Tetration, as was marketed to us. It was a huge downfall for us when they decided not to do that right now. 

I advise anyone to get training before you implement Cisco ACI.

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 for this solution is in our data center.

This is a modern, next-generation solution, and it is where the platform is going.

I have been told that this is an easy solution to configure, but we are just starting to deploy it, so that is to be determined.

ACI is not simple, by any stretch of the imagination.

We are not following the application-centric approach, but a network-centric approach instead. It would be nice if I could specify network-centric in my design, and the system would organize and set itself up in that way. Essentially, once you go into the GUI for the first time it would prompt you, and it would build out the infrastructure to accommodate your choice.

We have been in a lot of sessions with them and have done a lot of work with it in the lab. We've seen it grow over time. The early versions of the code were buggy and flakey, but as they have gone through newer iterations, we've seen it get better. It is at the point now where were are comfortable with it going into a production data center.

Scalability is definitely something that we're looking at, and it's one of the attractive features of ACI for us. It is easy to do.

The way ACI works is it is one configuration interface. If you want to add more then you just plug it in. I would not call it plug-and-play, but they've made it to the point where it is very close. 

This is important to us because we just don't know how our business is going to grow, and change, over time. It's a moving target for us. If we buy something today, and then there is a demand for more capacity in the data center, then we just have to buy more devices and plug them in. We don't have to do anything else. The infrastructure just becomes available for us to use. This differs considerably from the traditional Cisco, which involved a lot of command lines and configuration.

We have not really dealt with technical support, yet. We are using the Cisco professional services to help us with the design and configuration.

We were using the Cisco 9000 and we reached a point where investment was needed due to depreciation in our infrastructure. We needed to get rid of the old system, and then decide whether to stay with the Cisco 9000 or move to ACI. For us, we decided to employ a hybrid solution that uses both.

The initial setup of this solution is pretty straightforward. It is a plug-and-play type of solution where you can just take it out of the box and connect the wires.

Once this system is in place then it becomes complicated. However, the initial go at it is pretty straightforward, which is nice.

We are using Cisco professional services, as well as a VAR, to help us with the implementation. In order for us to go live, we have to make sure that our VAR is ready to support that.

It is too soon for us to realize ROI.

We're a Cisco shop, so we did not evaluate solutions from other vendors. We already have our partner for purchasing, and all of our relationships were already established. For us, it was simply a design decision between Cisco 9000 and ACI.

We are currently testing this solution in a lab, preparing for our deployment into production.

We are not ready to approach this solution in an application-centric way. It's a great overall architecture, good scalability-wise, easy to configure, and a central configuration, but there are too many knobs to turn.

We were originally going to use ACI for everything. However, after we really started looking at the design and having conversations with our Cisco advanced services team, we saw that it made sense to use a hybrid solution.

My advice for anybody interested in implementing this solution is to have a good look at your data center, your architecture, and importantly your operational and support team. If you have people who are familiar with the traditional way of doing Cisco, and have never touched ACI before, then there is a steep learning curve ahead. The operational team will have to ramp up and be educated. That was definitely a factor for us.

We have a third party operational team, and we had to challenge them. We asked if it was something that they could do, and they needed to prove it to us, first. This was done before we even went into the solution. The number one thing is that you have to be able to support it. If you have only two people installing it, then you're not going to be able to run support 24/7 for when something breaks at three in the morning.

This is a good solution, but I would really like to see the network-centric philosophy of configuration to be a little bit easier. The learning curve is steep. But, being somebody who has been traditional Cisco, iOS, and command line, I can say that this is completely different. It is a complete re-write of everything that you've ever thought of from a networking standpoint. It can simplify your life if you do it right.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.