We performed a comparison between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco ACI is a solid, robust solution but can be complex to understand and manage for users not familiar with the Cisco ecosystem. VMware is considered a solution that is easy to learn and manage and offers great security with a distributed firewall. This added security and micro-segmentation make VMware NSX a trusted, complete value-added solution.
"ACI's most valuable feature is its SDN capabilities. Everything is on your software design controller. Everything is blocked by default until you allow it."
"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 initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just moved from one platform to another."
"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."
"There are many features which are useful, like the automatic completion of the VXLAN."
"The most valuable features include microsegmentation, L3 Out features, and the common tenant and tenancy model."
"The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution."
"It has made it much easier to deploy and make changes in the data center versus the previous infrastructure, which was NX-OS based."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the ability to set up virtual networking environments."
"The ability to scale from different clouds. At the moment, the scalability of the product is the number one thing that I saw."
"The interface is intuitive enough."
"It has reduced the number of people on the network team along with the system engineer involved in the security process. So, it is valuable."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the ease of use and its user friendly. For example, it is simple to change the subnet masks."
"NSX can reduce costs and has good service. It is easy for you and your users to use."
"We secured our organisation with Micro-segmentation."
"The most valuable features are ease of use and user interface."
"It needs more integration with public clouds, like Azure and AWS."
"Training for this product is available from institutions but it is not available online where you can get users trained easily."
"It is challenging for people who don't understand the programming language, making it difficult to migrate. With technology, there are two verticals. One is hardware driven and the other is software driven. Most people in our domain understand networking, but they don't understand programming. When we migrate, some programming is required."
"They should improve the GUI, make it simpler. They also need to improve its integration with other automation tools."
"Figuring out how to implement the product for clients is the area we struggle with the most every day. Perhaps an enhancement would be artificially intelligent solutions, but that would be further down the road."
"The initial setup was a bit complex."
"From my point of view, troubleshooting issues relating to ACI can be a little bit complicated to perform."
"We have had two calls with technical support. They are not the best. We opened a case to diagnose issues and it's taken weeks to get someone on the case and to move forward."
"I would like them to make integration with other vendors easier."
"There could be an improvement in regards to security."
"They could do more with cloud management."
"They have some limitations in the firewall features as compared to the on-prem or dedicated hardware appliance. They can add more features, such as IPS and IDS, to the cloud firewall."
"In the future, the solution should be compliant with internet NIC."
"Lacks integration with other solutions."
"It lacks full knowledge of physical side of the network topology."
"If there are other solutions already in place, it can be difficult to implement."
Cisco ACI is ranked 1st in Network Virtualization with 96 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 2nd in Network Virtualization with 93 reviews. Cisco ACI is rated 8.0, while VMware NSX is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco ACI writes "Stable, easy to extend, scalable, and has a host-based routing feature". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware NSX writes "Allows for seamless micro-segmentation and the support is exceptional". Cisco ACI is most compared with Cisco Secure Workload, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Nuage Networks, Juniper Contrail Networking and HPE SDN, whereas VMware NSX is most compared with Nutanix Flow Network Security, Illumio, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Workload and Cisco DNA Center. See our Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX report.
See our list of best Network Virtualization vendors and best Cloud and Data Center Security vendors.
We monitor all Network Virtualization reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few.
-Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server where APIC software runs.
-VMware NSX doesn't have any physical network gear of its own, VMware NSX software runs on ESXi hosts(Any Vendor) & even NSX Bare Metal Edge runs on any Vendor hardware(check compatibility)
-Cisco ACI offers both Underlay & Overlay functionality
-VMware NSX is a software and it builds an Overlay tunnel for (VM/Container) communication on top of an already established IP network which can be build on hardware network gear (Cisco Legacy/ACI/Juniper etc.)
-Cisco ACI: To use micro-segmentation on a VM or Container level you will need some other Cisco products
-VMware NSX: Micro-segmentation can be done Out of the Box because DFW Distributed Firewall are applied on the vnic of a VM i.e. on the ESXi kernel.
Being different in many manners but they still define the SDN realm with L2-L7 Network services and what you choose over the other may depend on many other factors like what network gear you already have or if its Green or Brownfield deployment. For example if your infra already have something other than Cisco 9K switches and is well configured then it will make more sense to use NSX to make use of all the SDN functionalities. This is just an example not a recommendation.
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch. Cisco ACI can connect with both virtualized networks and physical networks.
As with many Cisco solutions, Cisco ACI has a steep learning curve. It is not user-friendly and most of our team would like to see a better GUI. It would be great if we could test upgrades in a simulation before implementing; this could save a lot of rework and downtime.
The key component for us with VMware NSX is the distributed firewall. VMware NSX can segment every application and server based on the ports with which they need to communicate. We can activate the ports we need and disable the ones we don’t. This really helps to keep things very secure and makes VMware NSX very flexible.
We would like to see VMware NSX integrate better with other open-source solutions; integration can be very complex leading many to simply choose not to use VMware NSX at all. We found some maximums can be very limiting, especially with very large environments. VMware can only be used with virtualized networks.
Conclusion:
Cisco ACI and VMware have many similar qualities and features. The fundamental difference is that Vmware NSX’s primary focus is on virtualized networks, while Cisco ACI can connect to both virtual and physical networks.
Vmware NSX can provide better levels of granularity and visibility into how your workload performs and functions. Cisco ACI does not provide this.
Because Cisco ACI is more robust and can handle both physical and virtual networks, Cisco ACI might be a more appropriate solution. At the end of the day, it really depends on your organization’s ecosystem and applications, features and utilities needed, and, of course, cost of implementation. You may need one of these solutions or both.