Cisco ACI Reviews

It is used in data centers.

It gives us a new way of providing the network.

Building the ACI Fabric is its most valuable feature. 

It needs to be able to function on the cloud.

I am not using it day-to-day at the moment. My impression is it is working fine.

On paper, it scales.

We did the deployment.

Start now with this technology.

It is used in our data center.

Automation is its most valuable feature.

• The way the objects are oriented on it are not as straightforward as they should be.
• The learning curve of this product is very steep. It is not what I'm used to.
• I miss having the CLI. I am old-fashioned.

It seems fairly stable. We have not had any major hiccups.

It is pretty scalable.

The technical support is good. We had an issue where we had to talk to Cisco's technical assistance, and it worked out.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just moved from one platform to another.

We use consultants for the deployment, and they were very helpful. They had experience that we didn't.

There was only one logical way to go, and that was with the Cisco ACI.

Just go for Cisco ACI.

It is a progressive tool. You can automate things with it. It is for a new generation of data centers.

The previous generation of networking, everything was slow, taking days to deploy and run a script. With Cisco ACI, I can deploy things with a script, then run it in five minutes.

• Automation
• Developing

Cisco should provide more examples of code in their website. Something that other people can use. There is a great place in the development area.

The stability is not bad, but could be improved. In the beginning, we had integration problems, but now, it is more stable.

There is a scalability path on the Cisco website. We are currently working on scaling the product.

Cisco has a powerful technical team, which is very useful for us.

The initial setup was complex.

We used an international company for the deployment. My colleagues were very happy with them. The deployment happened before I joined the company.

The thing that I like the most from Cisco is the support and all the documentation that they have. We do have to pay for it though.

We also considered Juniper.

I would recommend Cisco ACI.

We want to automate some of the operational tasks of our team. We have many configurations and switches. In the future, we want to deploy a solution where we can configure all our switches in one place. This is why we are looking to use Cisco ACI in the future.

• A lot of our tasks in cloud projects are now done faster than before. 
• We can implement customer requirements more quickly. 
• Our quality has improved because we have faster visibility into when faults occurs in the network.

The valuable feature is its configuration policy. We can configure it because the policy is used for all the switches. We do not have to implement all the configuration on every switch. 

Also, it fully integrates with most of our other tools, like Infoblox or vCenter, as its very powerful.

In the new version of 4.0, the management groups for updating the software is not the best way to do it. It was better in 3.2. There was a better overview of all the management groups with integrated switches. 

It is stable. The updates for Cisco ACI have been consistent with no failures.

Scalability is another point for our cloud project. We use Cisco ACI, because when we expand the network another 10 to 20 switches more, the switches are easier to implement now. We  connect the new switches to the spine infrastructure, then they are the switches are ready to configure.

Cisco technical support has been great over the last five to six years that I have worked with them. We have two open cases with them now. All issues are solved in a timely fashion. 

We were previously using the Nexus 7000. We upgraded from the Catalyst environment to the Nexus environment. Now, we want to use ACI for automation and integration of third-party hardware.

We switched to Cisco ACI because of it improvements to our operations and integrations with third-parties.

At the beginning, the initial setup was complex because it was another way of networking. After the first installation, the second and third installation with ACI Fabric was a bit easier to configure.

To install the complete ACI Fabric with all 10 to 12 switches, it takes one to two days, then it's finished. Once you configure the application, it runs. 

We deployed it in-house.

We have seen time improvement using the product.

We did not consider any other vendors. Because in the network environment, we can only buy Cisco or Juniper. However, Juniper does not have a solution for us.

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.

We use it for our data center.

It has made it much easier to deploy and make changes in the data center versus the previous infrastructure, which was NX-OS based.

• Software-defined
• Ease of deployment
• Ease of change
• Ease of segmentation
• Scalability

I know Cisco is trying to move away from CLI, but I would still like to see improvements to the CLI. Troubleshooting is quite difficult using other tools, and there are still quite a lot of people with the network engineer mindset who rely on CLIs. Therefore, it would be nice to have a unified CLI. They made big improvements on this last time, but it could use additional improvements.

Here are some of the issues that we encountered:

• We had lift switches which failed to forward traffic correctly.
• We had issues in the first deployment when we tried to finish the migration from traditional networking to Cisco ACI.
• We had issues with the propagation of the routes internally. Therefore, we had destinations which were reachable, but other destinations were unreachable in the same subnet.

It took quite a lot of tries to finish the migration, because our issues were always the same. These issues were related to silent hosts.

The stability has been decent so far. We have ran into some issues: 50 percent hardware and 50 percent software, but we solved them quite quickly.

The scalability is very good. This is one of the best features, because you can add it at any time, then scale as needed.

I would rate the technical support as an eight out of ten.

We were at the end of the lifecycle for the previous solution, which was Cisco Nexus based. We knew that we would stay with Cisco, so the proposal came up to choose between traditional and NX-OS and ACI. Therefore, we chose Nexus 9000, which allowed us to do both. Then, it came down to a decision on which solution to go with, and we thought SDN is the future. Thus, we chose SDN (ACI mode).

The setup was very straightforward. It was easy to deploy. The first configuration had issues, then adding the lift switches was easy.

When we deployed, we were partnered with defense services. We had engineers on site for the couple of tries that we did for the migration. They helped us and managed to solve our issues in the end.

Ensure you have the right qualifications to deploy and operate this solution, especially in the programming area.

Our main use case is for building data center stuff, putting in equipment and provisioning it.

It has saved me a couple of times, as just a backup feature.

It can easily do a snapshot before you do any change, and if something goes wrong, you can just rollback. It's pretty smooth, and it helps.

The UI is quite intuitive.

It is still not mature and has room to grow. As with any product out there, it requires time to develop.

We run into bugs from time to time. It is more from the perspective that we're not running the default configuration, so when we try to tweak it that is where we hit issues.

The transition period when you go from standard networking to the application centric tool can be difficult because you need to understand the new terminology, but you will get through it.

Previously, the product has had its stability issues. Now, it seems more or less okay.

In the past, there were some bugs we ran into, but those have been solved. They took some time, and we had downtime due to them. However, we have quite a good connection with Cisco tech support.

It is scalable. We have a lot of devices. Our network have tens of thousands of devices.

The technical support is good. We have a dedicated team from Cisco.

We were moving from one data center to multiple pristine data centers. We started looking into what can we do better operational-wise. We wanted to save time when we needed to implement stuff, etc., and were looking at the latest and greatest solutions.

We used a reseller for the deployment.

It depends on your vision and what you want to achieve, I would recommend going for Cisco ACI. Just make sure you have time to learn and get used to the new terminology.

We are pretty satisfied with what we have.

The primary use case for Cisco ACI is to migrate a legacy data center, including the new infrastructure.

The product has performed well. 

Automation is its most valuable feature.

The challenging thing about Cisco ACI was we had to put a lot of effort into providing the customer the full picture, new standards, and new technology that they had to use. This was more challenging than deploying the product.

There should be more focus on training and support.

I would like to see is more integration with services and service graphs.

The stability has been good.

The project is pretty small, but from what we have seen, it is scalable.

There have been challenges with the technical support. Though, the product is almost three to four-years-old, there are still things that only a few people can solve. So, Cisco should put more effort into training their people.

The business switched because the legacy way of operating these type of data centers is no longer optimal.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to set up, because our plans for migration were very detailed. We didn't have any problems with it.

We are the partner and the integrator.

It was Cisco ACI vs VMware NSX.

Eventually, the client chose Cisco ACI because they had more experience with Cisco and they still had a lot of physical infrastructure to handle.

It is one of the better solutions in the market right now.