Cisco ACI Reviews

Our primary use for this solution is centralization.

This solution has improved the way we operate because it is a time-saver.

This solution allows you to do everything quicker and more efficiently.

The CLI needs to be improved.

This product is pretty stable. 

The scalability is really good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Our setup is still in progress.

We used an integrator to assist us.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

We use it to design and manager our network. There are a lot of places inside the building, and we have to bring the new network everywhere to help us.

We use Cisco everywhere in our network, so it makes sense from a compatibility point of view.

The stability is perfect. We have had no problems with Cisco ACI.

We have not thought about scaling at this time.

As the project manager, I don't call the technical support.

We did not use another solution before Cisco ACI.

The initial setup was a bit complex.

Cisco helped us in the beginning.

Price is always an issue.

Our network is entirely Cisco, so we did not consider any other vendors.

Talk with Cisco partners and Cisco. When we needed to find a solution, they helped us to create the network.

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.

Primary use case is data center software-defined networking. We didn't have this before, so are just moving onto these new products to try to be more efficient with better performance.

It is more scalable than our previous products. 

The product works very well with our virtual environment.

• Telemetry
• Analyzing the environment.

Because this is new technology, which requires a different way of thinking, it can be hard to understand. Therefore, I would like more documentation or education.

It is very stable. It allows us to update firmware on the go without any downtime, which we couldn't do before. Everything is redundant, so if you shutdown one system, then another one takes over.

Its scalability is very good. It is really easy to scale in this product.

I haven't a lot of experience with technical support for this product. My colleague has experience with the technical support and says that they are good.

The old solution was outdated and not scalable. It was difficult to manage in a large scale environment. We do not have many people, so we needed to automate a lot of things. This new product helps us do that.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It has been a new technology for us, so we had  look at the documentation and follow the instructions, which were pretty good.

We used a Cisco partner who was very good, since we didn't know everything about the product from the start.

The pricing is pretty good for new technology.

We only thought about Cisco because they are our primary vendor for network solutions.

Receive education on the new product before you buy it, since it is pretty complex. It is not like the previous products. It has a different way of thinking. However, software-defined networking has a bright future, and it is a good idea to get onboard with it.

It is an upgrade from our previous data center technology.

The solution has allowed us to redesign our data center environment into more of a zone-based network where we can section off areas. It definitely gives us a lot more security and control in our data center.

The most valuable feature is that we have centralized management and control of pretty much the entire data center and the architecture of it. It gives us a genuine single pane of glass to look through to manage all of our devices.

We're still in the process of doing the migration. We haven't migrated completely all of our applications out of our legacy into it yet. It was challenging at first, but getting easier now that we're starting to get into it.

I haven't been using the product long enough to really be looking for additional features as I haven't exhausted learning about the features that are available.

The stability seems great. It's stable so far and we haven't run into too many issues at all.

The scalability of the product seems great. It doesn't seem to have too many limitations if you want to scale out. We haven't run into any issues yet.

Technical support has been pretty good. I haven't worked with them too much with the ACI stuff, but some of my coworkers have and they said they've had good support experiences.

I wasn't there for the driving factor behind the switch because I started when it was already being implemented. However, the company was already using Cisco before implementing Cisco ACI. The previous environment was an older version of the data center — 9Ks and 5Ks. Migrating over to the more centralized management of the newer ACI just makes sense.

I wasn't there for the initial setup, so I can't really comment on the initial setup. The only thing I can say is that the setup seems to be an ongoing process.

We had a consultant company help us deploy and it was a good experience.

We're still in the process of implementing the product, so I don't know if I'd be able to tell about an actual ROI already or define what that is.

I don't think there were considerations of any other products when we went to upgrade as it was just an upgrade from the previous architecture.

In rating the product, I'd give it an eight out of ten. It is a pretty stable product and gives us really good central management structure.

It was challenging at first, but getting easier now that we're starting to get into it.

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.

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.