Cisco ACI Reviews

Over the past six years, I've gained extensive experience with Cisco ACI, working on diverse solutions. This includes multi-site projects, like one involving a private bank with interconnected data centers utilizing Dark Fiber and Cisco ACI for seamless operations. I've also successfully integrated Cisco ACI with Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift to support container-based applications. I've played a dual role as an instructor, teaching Cisco ACI topics, and actively participating in various ACI-related projects. These projects have covered single-site, multi-site, and multi-tenant infrastructures, involving aspects like design, implementation, troubleshooting, and training, giving me a comprehensive understanding of the ACI ecosystem.

Our clients find several features of Cisco ACI particularly valuable, like the ability to create Service Graphs and employ Policy-Based Routing in an Application-Centric manner. One significant attraction for clients in Iran is the robustness of multicast solutions, which has been a major driver for them to migrate to Cisco ACI. It's worth noting that in Iran, the predominant IT infrastructure is on-premises, with limited usage of AWS or hybrid solutions.

While it is quite functional, I found it to be somewhat slow, and there was a notable issue related to the removal of the help section. In previous ACI versions, every configuration section had an accompanying help section that provided valuable information. This feature was removed in the latest version, and the reasoning behind this change is unclear. I believe there's room for improvement in terms of ACI's integration with various technologies. For instance, when it comes to integrating with Kubernetes, the compatibility is somewhat lagging.

I have approximately five to six years of experience working with Cisco ACI.

It exhibits remarkable stability, particularly from ACI version five onwards. For instance, the stock exchange infrastructure I've worked with has been operating flawlessly on ACI for almost two years now, with no significant issues. I would rate it ten out of ten.

I rate the scalability of ACI as nine out of ten, leaving room for potential improvements or aspects that I haven't explored fully.

I have never sought support from Cisco, mainly because of the nature of the operations and issues I've encountered. With the exception of hardware problems, which are usually beyond our control, I've handled all other situations and software failures directly.

Generally, I find the initial setup and configuration of Cisco ACI to be one of the simplest processes in the context of this technology, except in rare cases involving unique configurations. I would rate it eight out of ten.

The duration and complexity of the deployment can vary significantly based on the chosen approach, whether it's application-centric or network-centric. In the service recognition phase, especially for application-centric deployments, a deeper understanding of the service infrastructure is required. This involves collaboration with the software team to comprehend the service architecture, which can extend the deployment timeline. This approach differs from a more straightforward network-centric implementation where you might only need to convert legacy VLAN and IP contracts to ACI objects. In my experience, building Cisco ACI from the ground up can take anywhere from four months to nearly a year. For instance, if you aim to migrate swiftly to ACI without relying heavily on advanced features like service graphs and PBR, and simply want to establish ACI as the default gateway for servers, the fabric can be set up in as little as three to four months. Certain operations, such as the physical installation of spine switches, can extend the timeline from three to four months up to nearly a year for a complete project.

It is not very cheap, but it is still a cost-effective solution, especially when considering the broader context of data center expenses, including servers, storage, and firewalls. The pricing, including both hardware and licenses, is reasonable.

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

In the last nine months, I have done two projects with Cisco ACI. Both of them were banking systems. I'm capable of selling, installing, and deploying Cisco ACI, so I know all the licenses and prices as well as how to compare the prices and establish a pre-sales team and also doing the deployment and supporting the ACA solutions. 

The most important aspect of Cisco ACI in my opinion is the ease of management. Other solutions, like traditional solutions and pricier solutions—or even fabric and PAT—you have to do many configurations on a box-to-box basis, With Cisco ACI, you go on the AP and do some "next, next finish" installer. Everything is done without having to know about the VXLAN, AVPN, MP-BGP, or ISI. In previous solutions, you had to know all these things and deploy all of them yourself, so you needed a deep knowledge of VRF and all the other BGP things. You would have to remember everything about the detail configuration, but now we just do some clicks and everything is there.

The other benefit to me is the white-listing solution that the ACI can handle. It's important to have a good knowledge of IPS and DDoS things. I always prefer to stop traffic mid-way instead of putting everything on the firewall and blocking it on the firewall. In my opinion, a firewall has very limited resources and it is possible to run out of resources easily with a simple attack, like HPing. But when you do white-listing, you just greenlight your needed traffic, not all the traffic. So this is a very big difference. And also of course, nowadays everyone is talking about the ACR tool Heat that allows customized configuration to style. These are the major things and some other things like very low latency and few hops. 

Before version 5, you could manage your firewall or load balancer from the AP. It was very basic and now they removed the whole features in the new version, so you cannot manage your load balance or firewall from your AP on L2, L4, and L7 services. They can improve this because it's a little bit hard to send traffic with PBR or EPB to the box. They're returning back. That's one area where they could improve.

I've mostly worked with Cisco solutions in the last 15 or 17 years. I do everything from deploying enterprise solutions and developing data centers to building cloud applications with Cisco ACI or data solutions at the center, like MPP, GPU, AVPN, and VXLANs. Security-wise, I started with ASA and IPS then upgraded to Five Power and Snort. I also have a lot of experience with Ice and Identity solutions as well as ESA and WSA.

I believe that Cisco ACI is highly scalable. Anytime that you want to add bandwidth, you just need to add a spine and anytime you need more ports, you just need to add that. And the very cool feature is the different typology that ACI can support now. Before that, it was a stretch, especially the typology. Nowadays, everyone is talking about the IPN and the multi-part.

For bigger operations with different data centers in different locations, you can deploy multi-site and it also offers some support remotely. I've never deployed it, but you can use a virtual peak that gives this and also enables a multi-tier. That's also very helpful with customers that don't want to spend a lot of money for the cable or transceivers. And the hardware is massive. I really love the hardware. The MTBF is huge. Everything is stable.

I was also in Malaysia for many years as a CTO at a company before COVID and was a Cisco partner. So I know how to create tickets. I've experienced how they respond and escalate tickets. I was the business owner and promised stability and availability to my customers. I asked and they opened a ticket for me, and I'd give it to my friend. I only needed to interact with Cisco techs very few times. But for licensing things and hosting, I use support all the time.

In most cases, you just plug in the cables and it even has the cable cave, a guard system, attached spine to spine. In my opinion, the initial part that involves creating the overlay is very easy compared to an MP-BGP or VPN solution. So in that case, it definitely takes hours, especially if the site that you are working with ACI is multi-tenant. If it's multi-tenant and you are not using ACI or an MPG EVP solution, then it's hard for you to take care of the road fillers. And a BGP road target must be very accurate, but here you don't deal with anything. This is also very great about ACI, which takes less networking. There's no port. Everything is tied to the object. So that's very easy. I believe that it is exactly the same environment and same thing that we face with the Cisco Blade system. You can create a foreign device and attach it to any server on the Blade and everything works fine. 

I would rate Cisco ACI nine out of 10. I'm always trying to push customers to use Cisco solutions. When I'm talking to my clients or anyone else who is thinking about using Cisco solutions, I always say 10 out of 10, but I believe that there is some space for improvement. 

Our primary use case is replacing Nexus 7000 with Cisco NX-OS. We would like to replace this actuator with the newer Cisco ACI platform. We currently use Cisco Nexus 9000.

Cisco ACI improved the stability of our IT system and our data center.

We currently use the smooth upgrade process available in Cisco ACI, and it's really useful. I also like the augmentation of the bandwidth available in the platform with 10 and 40 GB interfaces.

Cisco ACI helps us better secure our infrastructure from end to end because we can use a contract to secure flow between endpoints in the data center.

Because we can use automation processes with this platform, we have been able to free up our IT department's time.

We can deploy applications quickly with automation, and we have been able to save time overall as an organization as well.

Our problems with Cisco ACI are mainly related to the contracts and how to manage them easily in the platform. Cisco also needs to improve the log files and the complexity of the graphical interface.

Cisco ACI is stable, and we haven't had any problems with the stability of the system.

We haven't had any problems with scaling the platform because it's easy to add a leaf or spine.

We have had good experiences with Cisco's technical support. They respond quickly and with accurate responses.

It takes some time to understand the new terms and concepts, but the deployment itself is completely smooth. We didn't have any problems deploying the solution.

We first deployed the solution on our qualification data center so that we could test the solution before we deployed it in the production data center.

We implemented it with the help of an integrator.

The pricing and licensing are both high, particularly if you want a high level of functionality. It would be great if the price and licensing costs could be decreased.

Cisco ACI works well, and it has been a good investment for us. There are a few areas for improvement, so I would give Cisco ACI an overall rating of eight out of ten.

We use this solution to achieve a properly defined data center, so we basically use it for SDN. 

The basic functionality that is the most useful is creating a virtual network on a physical device. We use it for Software-Defined Networking where we have a centralized controller, and the rest of the switches are just for packing traffic. When you have a centralized controller, it's easy to manage.

The virtualization part of it is still all hardware-based. You have to buy the switches, and they have to be Cisco switches. You cannot roll the Software-Defined Network and network virtualization over onto any other product. For example, if I have a mix of Juniper and Cisco in my network, they are of the same physical fabric layer, but when I want to virtualize, it's quite difficult. You cannot do it. There are solutions like NSX that can sit pretty on any physical layer, but Cisco SDN will only work with its own devices, so that's a downside. They need to be able to achieve virtualization end-to-end with Cisco ACI.

I have been using this product for over four years.

I rate the solution a nine and a half out of ten for stability. 

You can scale the solution, but you cannot scale to other products. I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability. 

For backup you might want two people, but one person can handle all of the maintenance. Everything is managed centrally. This is a backend product, so not everyone knows they are using Cisco ACI. The organization I currently work for has over 10,000 employees, and practically everyone is involved in usage of the solution. 

If you have the right license and premium support, the tech support is a nine out of ten.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the initial setup as a nine. It was very easy. There are some external factors you need to connect, like cables. However, with the push of a button, in less than 15 minutes, you can roll out the basic Cisco configuration.

It's a graphic installation. You will see buttons: "Next," "Next," "Next." It's very easy to get up and running, just like setting up a phone. "Do you want to install this?" "Yes." "Do you want to enable this?" "Yes." "Do you want to configure this?" Unlike before where you had to configure Cisco switches one at a time, now you manage and configure it centrally, and you have a template to work with.

Sometimes we handle the deployment ourselves, but for the current deployment we are rolling out, we have a system integrator. We have Cisco itself involved. 

The good thing about Cisco is that you can trade in your old products to replace them with ACI. On a scale of one to ten, where one is inexpensive and ten is expensive, I would rate them a two. 

We considered VMware NSX, but some believe that VMware is vulnerable, so we stuck with Cisco. 

I would 100% recommend Cisco ACI to other users. I would rate this solution as a ten out of ten. 

We have two clusters, the first one of which I upgraded last week to version 4.6, with the main cluster being, at the moment, 4.2. 

We are talking about simple things with which we use the solution, such as employing Cisco firewalls for protecting or managing some of the data. 

I actually managed a huge and very complicated corporate network, it being separated in many locations. We have i1 solutions and outstations which are all connected to our network. My primary focus nowadays is on our communication, on the head office network. 

We have a perimeter firewall when it comes to the hub, which is responsible for outbound and inbound traffic, in respect of the public services for outbound customers and outbound internet traffic for the internal RJ customers.

Our current H firewall is Fortinet, being the 3000 D series. 

There is a separation into five Vdoms, or virtual domains, which themselves are separated into a data center, firewall, VBN, publishing services, and proxy as a proxy firewall.

Routing mythology comes into play. At the moment, we have our AS number and BGP configuration with many service providers for the purpose of maintaining high availability and redundancy. So too, the Fortinet firewall is working in high availability mode.

When it comes to security, we recently switched to Fortinet, as we feel it to be more customizable for our use case in RJ than the solution. We moved because Cisco scored lower than Fortinet. 

While we have seen a return on our investment in certain cases, we have, of late, faced issues on the Call Manager, which we have. 

We have an on-premises, resistant license which we invested in. Out of nowhere, Cisco changed the licensing module to that of smart licensing, a perpetual license state, without offering any compensation to the customers. 

This made the license worthless and forced us to subscribe for smart licensing. This is the only way to continue receiving active support and upgrades from Cisco, not that anyone would say anything otherwise. 

Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing. For half the cost, I can obtain the same service with another product. 

It would be great if ACI would include the next generation firewall feature. 

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten, owing to the issue of the price and the complexity involved in its maintenance. 

I have been working with Cisco ACI for around five years. I have definitely worked with it in the past 12 months. 

The solution is definitely stable. 

The scalability is okay. 

Cisco technical support is great. 

In the past, I used Fortinet, Cisco ASA and Meraki. Currently, I use Cisco ASA and Fortinet. 

When it comes to security, we recently switched to Fortinet, as we feel it to be more customizable for our use case in RJ than the solution. We moved because Cisco scored lower than Fortinet.

When it comes to the installation, it is important to keep in mind that we are a corporate enterprise, which means that the complexity and customization are there. Many locations must be connected with each other. There is a need to apply many routing protocols, including EIGRB, static, and BGP. We have many protected areas in the backbone. 

In the middle are data center firewalls, which lie between the user and core switches. We also manage the wireless access. There is also Cisco Identity Service Engine, which manages access to the internet using authentication and posturing, based on the configured policies.

Much staff is needed for maintenance. This varies with the work payload. 

While we have seen a return on our investment in certain cases, we have, of late, faced issues on the Call Manager, which we have.

We have an on-premises, resistant license which we invested in. Out of nowhere, Cisco changed the licensing module to that of smart licensing, a perpetual license state, without offering any compensation to the the customers.

This made the license worthless and forced us to subscribe for smart licensing. This is the only way to continue receiving active support and upgrades from Cisco, not that anyone would say anything were I to stop. The licensing issue contributes to my decision to rate the solution as an eight out of ten. 

Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing. For half the cost, I can obtain the same service with another product.

We are talking about the cost of the renewal. 

Cisco solution is a perfect product and considered number one in the world in many parts.

Cisco ACI is a great product. It's nice to have in the company.

I am the network administrator in the enterprise company.

I rate Cisco ACI as an eight out of ten. 

We are transforming from an old legacy, non-Cisco network to a state-of-the-art data center.
Cisco ACI is reducing a lot of competence on the network. We are reducing a lot of assets, a footprint itself. It has one single pane of glass management. We use it to support our clients.

The efficiency in terms of the data center latency has been reduced by around 20-30%. Our applications function a lot better. We get a lot of intuitive data to know how our application stack is performing. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the single pane of management. You can have various API integrations and you can have software-defined scripts.

Cisco ACI can build things for you which was not possible on legacy networks. 

The additional features I would like to see included in the next releases are support for our policy-based routing. There are endpoint issues that are there now in the code. Hopefully, these will get fixed in the future code. 

In terms of scriptings, there are a lot of APIs available but there's a big gap with networking and the application. That's a gap that we're trying to bridge to understand how to do scripting. 

So far, the stability has been good. There have been a lot of updates going in and things are getting a lot better.

Cisco ACI is very scalable. There's no real length to it. If you look at ACI, you can have an endless number of layers. 

The size of our environment is about 2,000 nodes. It's not a huge network, it's pretty medium-sized.

We use technical support for this product. We have our internal support team also. If we have additional feedback needed, we go back to Cisco. We are Cisco partners. Our experience with their support has been very good. I can communicate directly with certain BUs. 

We have been able to communicate with Cisco directly on certain questions. There are issues which have been very easy to resolve.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex at all. It is plug-and-play. Then you add more switches into the network and you don't need to configure anything. 

We have not yet seen the ROI. We are in a transformation journey right now where you can clearly see how that is happening.

We have the smart licensing, but that was supported when we bought ACI. Smart licensing was not there previously. Recently, we migrated to the new code.

We had to convert to smart licensing. Licensing is for the overall number of nodes. We have a license for all 1,000 nodes right now.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this product at an 8 to leave a little bit of room for improvement.

I would advise someone considering this solution to do your homework. If you are trying to consolidate your data center, Cisco  ACI is probably the best product out there.

We started working with a customer which is in the Netherlands. They are really important for us. They started migrating the building of their CRM to ACI. We started with 2.0. We just upgraded the fabric to 3.2. In the next three months, we are aiming to migrate and upgrade the fabric plan to 4.0

Our customer has around 1,000 virtual machines and before, they were all 100 physical servers which, on our side, were obviously consuming energy and resources. Now everything is on the customer and so it's up to them to manage the size of the virtual machines. 

The straightforward migration of all of the applications and loop balancing are the two most valuable features. Also, the measurement of their customer-wide sources is very straightforward. It's another dimension of the networks.

The virtualization area needs improvement but I expect that to happen with the 4.0 version.

I would like for them to develop integration with AWS. 

Scalability is pretty good. 

Their technical support is top notch. 

We had reached the capacity in the data center. We could build a new data center or buy a new solution so we migrated to a new solution to save space. 

The setup was complex because we have a complex internet architecture. It wasn't because of the product. It was complex because of internal issues on our side. 

We had Cisco support but everything was done internally. 

We only looked at Cisco because we have all of our routing and switching infrastructure with Cisco. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There's room for improvement in the software version. To get to a ten, they should improve the virtualization and develop integration with AWS. 

For companies starting from scratch, ACI is the best solution in terms of the space needed and time to delivery. 

Cisco ACI is used in the data center ecosystem. It's an eco-space solution. It's a DMB solution where you have the big hybrid data center you want to deploy on-premises, so the goal is to integrate all the virtual environments on feature environment servers with the data center.

What's most valuable in Cisco ACI is that it isn't like the legacy infrastructure where you have a lot of complexity in a TTR architecture.

What I like most about Cisco ACI is that you can control those devices from a single console, even if you have three hundred devices. You can manage the entire infrastructure from a single point of contact, so Cisco ACI is a time saver.

Another exclusive feature of Cisco ACI is its API interface that lets you enhance automation within the environment.

You can manage your entire data center from a single interface through Cisco ACI. If you want to upgrade three hundred devices in one click, you can do that, and within one hour, all three hundred devices will be upgraded.

I also like that Cisco keeps enhancing the product by adding different features, so there have been five major releases of Cisco ACI.

Another valuable feature of the solution is that it's more user-friendly than Aruba and Juniper.

An area for improvement in Cisco ACI is security, which Cisco needs to enhance in the solution. Though Cisco ACI uses a whitelist model, you must purchase an external product, such as a security firewall solution, to make whitelisting work, which the customer could find expensive.

For example, you're a customer who has Cisco ACI, and the solution doesn't have IP-based filtering, so as a customer, you've purchased Cisco ACI. However, you still need to buy another product for security, and some customers wouldn't like that. However, some customers prefer to go with Cisco ACI because of its scalability and flexibility versus other solutions such as Juniper and Aruba.

Technical support for Cisco ACI also needs improvement, particularly in product knowledge.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Cisco ACI is segment routing. For example, if you have an MPLS network, you can't directly integrate it with Cisco ACI at the moment. Suppose you have multiple data centers you want to connect to the MPLS private link through your service provider. In that case, you can't directly integrate that with Cisco ACI without an external device, which doesn't make sense to the customer. Cisco recently introduced the MPLS feature in Cisco ACI, but it's not up to the mark.

We've been involved with Cisco ACI since 2015, and have deployed the solution for more than thirty projects.

Cisco ACI used to be unstable, but after version 4.2, it's been very stable in the production environment.

Scalability-wise, Cisco ACI is a good solution because you can have more than five thousand servers in one ACI fabric. There's a lot of flexibility and scalability in Cisco ACI because you can even seamlessly integrate it with legacy infrastructure despite having a different data center.

Cisco support used to be good, but over time, many newbies were hired to provide technical support for Cisco ACI and other Cisco products, so the quality has decreased. The support provided before 2018 was good, but now, the Cisco technical support team has been struggling to give good support or provide expertise in some areas.

For example, if you raise an issue, you have to ask multiple engineers and make numerous escalations. Cisco ACI is a good product, but the support quality nowadays isn't up to the mark.

Cisco requires the customer to have some experience with the product before deployment, but novice technical support is brought in without sufficient training or without training the newbies for at least six months. The technical support team seems to just select cases and works on those without enough knowledge, so the customer experience is bad.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating Cisco support a three.

Some customers used Juniper and Aruba but went with Cisco ACI because the other two solutions weren't as user-friendly.

Anyone setting up Cisco ACI for the first time will see that it requires a lot of resources. Still, even if the initial setup is complicated, you can refer to the Cisco website regarding the steps you need to perform to complete the setup. Cisco explained the process well, and you can even take a workshop on it.

From a configuration point of view, I found Cisco ACI complex because it isn't easy to create the policy. Unless you have a good networking background, you won't be able to set up Cisco ACI easily.

For example, if your organization doesn't have experienced engineers, Cisco provides a two-day workshop for your engineers. Cisco also offers many free tools in the market to help you set up your account.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the initial setup for Cisco ACI as four.

Pricing for Cisco ACI could be expensive if you're not a gold partner. If you're a gold partner, you'll get reasonable pricing, but to become a gold partner, you must cross several layers. For example, at least twenty engineers within your organization have to be certified, with each certification priced at £2,000 minimum, so this would make some companies think twice about the product. If you're going for Aruba and Juniper products, on the other hand, you can quickly get the partner status, and you can start selling the product.

As a gold partner, you can get up to seventy percent discount on Cisco ACI, for example, while an ordinary partner gets ten percent off.

Cisco ACI is expensive for both customers and partners, but I'm rating pricing for the product as four out of five because even if the price is costly, you get a lot of benefits from the product.

Cisco ACI isn't the best, price-wise, but it's still a good solution. If you're in a small organization, you may be unable to afford it. Cisco ACI is best for enterprises but not SMBs because Cisco ACI and its required resources are expensive.

I've evaluated VMware NSX, but it can't compete with Cisco ACI. Cisco ACI is a hardware-level product that can support terabytes and petabytes of data at the same time, which VMware NSX can't do because it's a virtual environment with limited throughput and scalability.

If you're planning to apply terabytes of traffic in VMware NSX, you'll find it hard, and the solution will eventually choke after some time.

Cisco ACI has the best scalability. Cisco also has categories where particular hardware will be recommended based on your requirement, for example, whether you have petabytes or terabytes of data.

My company is mainly involved with three products, Cisco ACI, Cisco FTD, and Cisco WebDialer.

My company is a reseller/integrator for Cisco ACI.

I'd rate Cisco ACI as nine out of ten.