Cisco ACI Reviews

The most valuable features of Cisco ACI are the EPGs and the micro segmentation.

I would like to see Cisco ACI become more similar to what SD is, with improvements made to the onboarding on the multiport situation. Currently, it is complicated.

Cisco ACI would benefit by providing the option to integrate easily with DNAC in their next release.

I have been using Cisco ACI for a couple of years.

The solution is stable.

Cisco ACI is scalable and easy to expand. Cisco ACI is a data center concept. We have 1000 servers.

Technical support from Cisco is good. They are knowledgeable. I would rate their customer service and support a five out of five. 

Positive

The initial setup of Cisco ACI is simple.

Cisco ACI is more expensive than Juniper, however, ACI is not the most expensive option.

Prior to choosing Cisco ACI, we evaluated Juniper. 

Overall, I would rate Cisco ACI an eight out of ten.

My customers use Cisco ACI to replace the legacy networks that they have. Most of the time, however, they don't seem to be using the functionalities that are specific to ACI. They just use the base consumer functionalities similar to what they were using in the old solution.

One of the most valuable features is centralized management. The other is the ability to create policies by routing.

The learning curve is long. It's very difficult to learn Cisco ACI. As a result, our customers usually have difficulty working with this solution.

I started working with Cisco ACI about two years ago.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

They have good technical support, and I would give them an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial deployment is not difficult, but the migration from old networks to Cisco API is not easy. However, migrations are usually not easy.

If I were to rate the deployment on a scale from one to five with one being the most difficult and five being the easiest, I'd give it a two.

It's not difficult to maintain, but it's difficult to learn how to maintain it. Once you learn it, however, it's easy to maintain.

You should spend a lot of time learning the solution. I recommend Cisco ACI because right now, there is no other solution like it. It's a good solution with central management, and I would give it a rating of seven out of ten.

We use Cisco ACI in the data center

You can integrate Cisco ACI well with VMware. 

I've been using Cisco ACI for about two years. 

So far, Cisco ACI's stability has been good because they use the Nexus hardware but with different software. 

The scalability depends on the hardware performance. Most of vendors use the traditional chip such as Broadcom , so I suppose the performance and scalability of ACI switches are the same as other competitors. 

Cisco support is way better than the competition in my experience. I can rate them five out of five.

Like most SDN solutions, Cisco ACI is easy to deploy. 

I rate Cisco ACI eight out of 10. Cisco ACI is a highly complex solution. The initial deployment is just a few clicks, but understanding how an ACI works and interacts with routing, switching, and virtualization takes a lot of knowledge. The interface isn't necessarily hard to use, but the technology concepts is complicated. If you want to understand deep dive how it works and how it integrate together , you should study hard. Other SDN solutions like Juniper IP Fabric are more straightforward. ACI is more complex in terms of the concept.

This is software-defined networking. So, all the configuration done on a customer network is done with this application.

I am using the version before the latest version.

It is very easy to do the configuration after you know how to work with the product. It is global, so you change one interface, and changes are reflected on every switch.

Its graphical user interface (GUI) is not as user-friendly as it could be.

It is quite expensive.

I have been using this solution for about a month.

It is stable and reliable.

It is quite scalable. It is one of the most scalable products we have come across.

We have five people who are using it in our company in Portugal.

We haven't had any need.

We were using a different solution, but it was not for software-defined networking. It was for a different type of networking.

It is very complex. All the configuration that needs to be done on the Cisco ACI is very complex. We have to create base policies for all the network devices and then implement it. Afterward, it is rather easy, but the implementation part is a long and complex process.

After it is deployed, it is rather easy because all the configuration is done automatically. You only need to do regular visits to see that it is working and do some regular tests. It is not that difficult.

We took Cisco's help.

It is quite expensive. It is not at all on the cheap or medium side.

I am quite new to this product, and I am still learning it. My recommendation would depend upon the size of the organization. It is one of the flagship products of Cisco, but it is not a product that you can implement for any customer. It is more suitable for medium to large enterprises.

I would rate Cisco ACI an eight out of 10.

The primary use case was to implement SDN in the data center to bring new technology for the application team.

We had different networks and combined them with ACI so we could have the control of one controller-based network. Also, everything is combined now. Automation is running so that the operational effort was reduct massivley.

We have the flexibility to bring an application from wherever it is located from one end of application to the other. It has overlay at the end.

I don't like the idea that Cisco is bringing in different machines or dashboards. This does not allow us to have one solution. We are viewing the DNA Center, ACI, and Meraki. A link from another system may have you end up in the Meraki dashboard, that's not what I expect. I want to have one single pane of glass where I can see and do the changes on every thing.

I would like to be able to test the upgrades in a simulation before implementing them in production because not everyone has a lab.

Nexus Dashboard could bring us a hugh step forward to become more felxible and agile.

2,5 years

In the beginning, the stability was not that good. However, the code now seems to be stable.

We like its scalability because we have use its paths to bring all the networks into ACI. Therefore, we need to be able to scale.

I like the technical support. It is great. We have a good team on the other end of the line. We also have good support from our sales engineer (SE).

We started with Cisco solutions and are now switching to ACI, which is the new solution. If it doesn't work how I expect, I will consider exchanging it.

The initial setup is straightforward, as it has a network-centric approach.

I joined the team after they did the integration, but I know that they bought the starter kit from Cisco. Our company had a lot of issues with the starter kit.

Once you sign for the start kit implementation, you have to go all the way through to the implementation, even if you are experiences issues.

I do not know who was on the shortlist.

For me, Cisco is the best solution.

I would tell someone considering this solution to talk to an account manager from Cisco and some technical people. Then, go to a Cisco conference and discuss the product with people, e.g., ask them how they did the implementation. 

I am an implementer. Whenever a customer purchases this solution, I go on-site and deploy it for them.

From my point of view, troubleshooting issues relating to ACI can be a little bit complicated to perform.

I have been using Cisco ACI for roughly six months.

This solution is both scalable and stable.

Cisco's technical support team is very good.

If you know the steps, then the initial setup is quite straightforward. You need to know how to configure it. You're looking at a minimum of at least five working days to build the infrastructure. After that, it depends on how many devices you want to connect.

I don't believe there is any licensing required.

Normally ACI is implemented in the data-center — It's not an end-user product.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

There are some issues regarding the orchestration of vendors and integration that need to be addressed.

I am a technology consultant and my company is implementing this product for data center networking.

The most valuable feature is the throughput that it offers.

Training for this product is available from institutions but it is not available online where you can get users trained easily. It would be better if the training for our users was easier to get.

Cisco ACI should have better integration with a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or KVM. This would give us a one-window solution for our networking, compute, and storage.

I have been working with Cisco ACI for about two years.

Our customers are very much satisfied with the stability. We do not have any issues with it.

It is scalable, although it depends on the design and the customer.

This is not a product for small-scale users. If we have customers with large data center requirements, we offer them Cisco ACI. For example, it is not for small enterprises without a lot of services running in their data center.

Scaling is easy because we can add, as required. While it depends on the design, scalability is not normally an issue.

We have received technical support when required and we are pretty satisfied with the support we get.

The initial setup is okay. It is not very complex, although I would not say it is very user-friendly because it is different from what we have been using. The best way to put it is that for me, it is new and it is straightforward.

A complete deployment, including the migration from their existing system, will take approximately two months.

Initially, we had Professional Services assist with hour deployment.

This is an expensive solution.

Overall, this is a good product but if it had better integration then I would rate it a full ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case for this solution is to use it as our data center backbone. We've got multiple tenants built on it in a network-centric design. We have our Dev\QA Tenant, User Acceptance Tenant, Production Tenant, DMZ, and then UserEdge, where everything basically comes in and goes out. We have Firepower firewalls in-between, but we're basically using Cisco ACI to microsegment between the networks within the tenants. But intra-tenant traffic goes through the firewalls. 

Before we started using Cisco ACI, everything was essentially flat open access. By using ACI, we're able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment. We are basically 99.99% virtual at our data center. There are many features we haven't even started using, but we will get there. 

The features we find most valuable is the integration with the virtual switches of our UCS platform. It gives a lot of visibility right from the ACI console, the ability to channel out the traffic and segment it without having to get into separate physical hardware or trying to figure out VDCs manually. So far that's been really powerful and extremely useful for us.

I think there are a lot of additional features that we haven't had a chance to look at yet, but I would like to see a simpler interface where it is easy to find endpoints and get information about them. Making it more user-friendly would be wonderful. That is my main concern. 

The stability has been good so far. We've got a big project to start doing upgrades on it. But it's been very stable and functioning properly. We haven't really had any issues with it as long as I've been here at the company. I'm sure there were some issues during deployment cause that was before my time. But it's been very stable for me.

In terms of scalability, we haven't grown the deployment yet and we are nowhere near capacity. But it seems like it is relatively scalable in terms of what we could use. It's a matter of what do we need. I just haven't had the opportunity to increase the scale of what we have right now.

The initial setup was fairly complex and it looks terrifying when you first log in. That's one thing about ACI. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but someone who has never worked with anything like ACI, will initially find it difficult to grasp the complexity of it.

We've used a couple of consultants over the last few years. I believe it was BT that helped us with the initial setup, and we're working with Presidio on the upgrade project. As far as I know, the technical support from BT was great. And the people at Presidio know their stuff, they seem to have good plans for where they're going with it. They put together a concrete plan rather than just saying, "Oh, let's just go for it."

I believe there is an ROI. We've been able to streamline our processes dramatically because of the way the new architecture works. So while it was a large investment, I believe that it had a big impact on the general productivity of our systems.

Not many people up in the northeast are familiar with Cisco ACI. It's kind of new and scary, so a lot of people are a little wary of it. Now that I've worked on it for a while, I find it very powerful. Getting direct access into the virtual switches is a huge advantage. I'm not the kind of person who rates nines and tens under many circumstances. So I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My advice to others would be to take a good long look at it. It's great for segmenting your network and doing a little micro-segmentation in your data center. If you're familiar with the Nexus OS and the Nexus hardware platform, you will find that this is the same hardware platform as you would use in a Nexus OS deployment. Also, make sure you get a lot of training as part of your deployment. That would probably be my biggest piece of advice. Make sure that you get educated on how it works and why it was designed the way it was, or what the best practice design is if you're designing it on your own.