The easiest route - we'll conduct a 15 minute phone interview and write up the review for you.
Use our online form to submit your review. It's quick and you can post anonymously.
Cisco ACI, called Application Centric Infrastructure, is the main backbone for our data center networking, which manages all the enterprise data center networking and how all virtual machines, servers, and bare metal hosts are interconnected together. I manage both production and the disaster recovery site, so that's what it is used for in my organization.
One of the interesting use cases of Cisco ACI is what we call Interpod networking. We call it IPN, and it's a situation whereby you can integrate it with another router or a firewall so that the traffic will be exposed to another device. Maybe you want to reach what we call majorly a north-south traffic, where a subnet or IPs or servers that are on Cisco ACI could easily reach other networks outside of Cisco ACI.
I have another use case called VMM migration. Cisco ACI natively supports virtual machine migration, such as ESXi hosts, making it easy to manage. An ESXi vCenter can be easily supported on Cisco ACI, and I've integrated vCenter 6.0, 7.0, and I'm even working on a project now with vCenter 8.0, which is also easy to manage. A vCenter is a virtualization infrastructure to manage servers, and it can be easily integrated with Cisco ACI, allowing you to push all the endpoint groups, which are the subnet and grouping, directly into the ESXi environment. Additionally, it supports Canonical, an OpenStack cloud solution, and it's one of the use cases I've been currently working on from the beginning of this year as well.
One of the interesting features Cisco ACI offers is tenant or endpoint group isolation, allowing you to easily bucket your applications, such as your database, web services, and third-party services into different endpoint groups. By using contracts, you can manage them, and that helps in enforcing a zero-trust environment, which is one of the features I love about Cisco ACI. Furthermore, it allows for easy management of virtualization infrastructure, such as the ESXi and OpenStack.
The tenant helps my organization day-to-day by making connectivity more secure and easier to manage, enabling me as a network administrator to design communications. I can easily specify which web servers should access the database servers on a particular port. Thus, endpoint group isolation really helps a lot to ensure zero-trust communication and achieve more security in the network infrastructure.
Another feature worth mentioning is the observability in terms of the endpoint tracker and the ability to see the flow as well. I think that's one of the things I love about Cisco ACI.
Cisco ACI has positively impacted my organization by making management easier. It's simpler to manage, replacing the need for numerous Nexus switches. Having a Cisco ACI fabric has really assisted us in managing our bare metal servers, including Cisco chassis, Dell chassis, HP servers, and all of that. It significantly enhances our data center networking and helps in cost savings, as you don't need to buy switches repeatedly or manage Nexus switches differently. With the Cisco ACI fabric, you manage them as a whole, and it's an automation-driven solution, with our network development team integrating with the APIs to establish workflows for observability, fault alerts, monitoring, and more. It supports an API-driven development tool as well.
I believe Cisco ACI could improve by incorporating something related to agentic AI, where it can execute tasks based on particular evaluations or loop engineering, enhancing fault identification or suggestions based on each tenant's configuration.
Additionally, I think they should ensure that the documentation is comprehensive. I appreciate that Cisco provides documentation, and their support engineers are helpful in case of any issues.
In terms of governance and security regarding Cisco ACI's AI capabilities, I think what we call evals or evaluations is important, whereby the engineer can evaluate the functionalities of the AI in Cisco ACI, preventing it from making deletions or modifications on its own. Therefore, there should be evaluations or guardrails incorporated into the development capabilities.
Regarding accuracy and reliability of output for Cisco ACI's AI capabilities, it hasn't met my expectations. What we need is something called RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation. If Cisco can implement that to utilize customer-specific data instead of general knowledge, while ensuring data privacy under GDPR laws, I think that will result in very good, reliable output.
I've been using Cisco ACI for the past five years, managing it and working with it.
Cisco ACI is stable in my experience.
Cisco ACI has been stable and reliable for me.
Cisco ACI's scalability is impressive and can handle growth or changes easily within my organization. One of the beauties of Cisco ACI is that you only need to increase the number of leaf switches to scale it, making it easy for us.
My experience with customer support has been very good; the TAC engineers are doing well.
Before Cisco ACI, we used Cisco Nexus before migrating to it.
Before choosing Cisco ACI, we evaluated other options, including Huawei SDN and Dell SDN, but with all the features and capabilities, we decided to go with Cisco ACI.
I rate Cisco ACI around an 8 out of 10.
I rate it an eight because it's a very good tool for me. I've been using it for a while, and it has provided a lot of progress, easing my work as I enjoy its networking features. There was even a time when we had an issue with Cisco ACI, and the TAC engineer suggested we upgrade, which resolved the problems we were facing. So, it's a very great tool for me.
Regarding cost savings and automation impact, it saves about five hours typically spent logging into the APIC controller and checking the console or dashboard for faults or fabric checks. That's one of the efficiencies we've gained. It also provides a quick SLA and quick MTTR, enabling us to easily detect issues on the fabric with automation-driven workflows, such as when an interface is down or when the T-cap is higher than expected, allowing for instant resolution.
My advice for others looking into using Cisco ACI is that it's a good tool and they can use it. They have good support, great documentation, and it can handle their expectations. My overall rating for Cisco ACI is an 8 out of 10.
