Cisco ACI Reviews

The primary use case is in an environment where the customer has a very large virtual compute and a lot of physical compute as well - in terms of the number of servers - and a big heterogeneous firewall. They want to converge their racks where they have a physical firewall and a virtual firewall. They have their metal servers and VMware or Hyper-V VMs. This is the best use case. This is where ACI fits best because it can integrate the physical and virtual environments together within a single fabric. It can give a very good overview, an "aerial view" of your whole data center within your fabric. That's the best use case.

The improvement I have seen after ACI has been implemented is that companies that wanted to implement a service lifecycle of any services, or that wanted to do automation, really improved their deployment times. Once the fabric is up, then they can start doing so. Customers usually get confused and think that if they implement ACI then everything gets automated. No. That's a mistake. With ACI, you have to buy software, an automation orchestration tool like Ansible, UCSD, or vRealize - tools to automate.

The improvement is that when companies buy an automation tool with Cisco ACI, the deployment time, their designs, are really fast. 

Another improvement is that customers say that the performance is really good with their new network.

The best part of ACI is that it can integrate with a lot of virtual environments like VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM. That's the best feature that sticks out in my mind because I have worked with customers who were looking into different solutions. The biggest selling point for them, which finalized their choice of ACI, was because it supported both Microsoft and VMware.

Better troubleshooting features would be helpful. In ACI, it can be a big mess, a real headache to troubleshoot a single issue. Cisco should work on the troubleshooting part of ACI. The troubleshooting part, and the information that ACI gives you, sometimes don't give you a proper, inside picture of what's going on within the fabric.

We had an issue where the customer was not able to sync with the NTP server and we were not able to identify the problem. The NTP was just not talking to ACI. The troubleshooting part is a bit difficult in ACI, and I feel that it should have been improved a long ago, but I don't know if they're working on it or not.

Also, they have the new designs for Multipod and Multi-Site. There are a lot of good features, like static storage connections. But I have seen some customers that faced issues with connecting the storage to the fabric.

The stability is good. Initially, it was not that good, but now it's really good with the new code.

I would give the solution's scalability an eight out of ten. The scalability options are really good. You just connect the leaves to the spine and it comes up. The scalability is not an issue.

The biggest environment I've worked with has two spines, spines with 16 leaves.

In terms of the number of users on it, initially it was really difficult for customers to adopt the new technology because it was a wholly new concept. Now, with time, and as ACI comes out with the new features, and the stability is really strong, the adoption is really good. According to Cisco engineers, they have customers who have gone up to 6,000 users.

Regarding the possibility of our customers' increasing their usage of ACI, we don't see that much indication of it, because what the customers are looking is more along the lines of having their fabric be more redundant. One of the features engineers are looking for is the Endpoint Tracker, which has had some issues. It is not that user-friendly.

I love their tech support. I would rate it at eight out of ten. It's really good with ACI. Even non-ACI support is really good. If you open a P1 case, an engineer comes online within ten to 15 minutes and starts doing the debugging and troubleshooting with you. 

I had an issue with their HyperFlex solution where the issue was more an interior design issue, and not a Cisco issue, but the tech came onto the call in 10 minutes and worked with me for six hours, non-stop, to fix the issue. They do it really slowly because they don't want to impact production. Otherwise, they could probably have done it in 15 to 20 minutes.

The initial setup is really straightforward. Very easy.

In terms of implementation strategy, Cisco has a concept called the Zero Touch installation, where you just connect the fabric and it actually starts discovering its own fabric. The implementation strategy is to install ACI in a silo'ed environment first, set all the policies there, and then connect your existing network parallel to ACI so that the network has a redundant connection to ACI. Then you gradually move your network connections from the legacy to ACI. This is how Cisco recommends an implementation be done.

It usually doesn't take more than a week for all that, max. We usually do it with two people, and we do it very smoothly. Usually, when you bring the fabric up, you have to make a lot of policies, including software profiles and the like. That is time-consuming work, but once it's done you can just recall them again and again in the customer's environment. That's the only thing that we need two people for. After that, when you're done, a single engineer can get migrate the network to ACI.

Maintenance of ACI is really easy, to decommission a leaf switch or a spine switch. When you decommission a switch from your existing ACI fabric, it's straightforward. In general one engineer is required for maintenance with a second engineer as a backup. Maintenance is really easy with ACI. Even if you're upgrading your fabric to new software, it's straightforward because they have built-in connections within the fabric. There is zero downtime. We have done it many times with zero downtime in a production environment.

One of our customers is a petroleum development company in the Middle East. They have seen very good ROI by implementing ACI. Their compute was relatively very new and their network was relatively very old. They saw very good ROI by having a very good, stable fabric that gives them very good response time on the network side.

The second part is that they wanted to implement a cloud solution which would support their existing Hyper-V and Microsoft. That was where the customer saw a good ROI on the investment. They were very happy with Cisco ACI.

I'm not involved in the pricing part, but Cisco has come up with Smart Licensing, which is a bit higher. But now they're giving the customers very good discount rates to bring customers in.

We are using VMware NSX in our environment as well. We had a customer that was using both NSX and ACI in their environment.

The good thing about NSX is that it has really strong support for the virtualized environment. And now the security is an integral part of their network solution, with the Distributed Firewall and the Edge Firewall. But it has some of its own issues because in a virtual environment, when you have big data centers where there is a lot of traffic coming in from the routing site, it's usually not up to that mark. Cisco has better visibility into that. If I compare it with ACI, ACI has a very strong routing component, but it has its own shortcomings.

In terms of rating NSX, I'm going to be biased because I work in ACI. I like NSX as well, it is a great product. It has a lot of flexibility because you can use existing servers and install NSX on them and It works pretty well. I rate NSX at six out of ten. The reason I rate it a little bit less than ACI is because its only native, strong support is for VMware. ACI has native support for Hyper-V and VMware.

Plan. Don't jump to a conclusion, plan it. You should first know your infrastructure and what your targets are, what you are trying to implement because, when you are more security focused, Cisco ACI can give you a tough in implementation. If you are more into converging your fabric, you want to your data center to be very converged into a single fabric with fast convergence times, go for ACI. There are different use cases based on what the customer's priorities are. So plan well, know your target, what you're trying to achieve. If you want to deploy more VMs faster, go for NSX. Don't go for ACI for that.

As a Cisco partner, our company does training and implementations on Cisco's behalf for different customers. Sometimes Cisco needs some advanced services to help the customer to do the implementation. Sometimes the customer has a problem with the ACI service. It's a new technology so some customers are really confused with the new terms and the new deployment style of ACI. They cannot compare it with their legacy solution, and when they start comparing it they get confused. We help with how the migration should be done from the legacy to ACI.

I would rate Cisco ACI at seven out of ten. The good thing about ACI is its integration with the different hypervisors. It supports VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM. When a customer is looking into a heterogeneous environment where ACI is involved and the other part is VMware for their NSX SDN, VMware has now come up with its own heterogeneous system, NSX-V. They realized very late that they had a problem, that they could only integrate with the VMware environment. Where Cisco ACI had an edge over them was that they could integrate with the virtual environment of Hyper-V, VMware, and KVM very well. And ACI automation also helps deploy and do the integration very easily in the virtual compute part of the network.

Also with ACI, the performance of switches is really good - it's actually a hardware-based SDN - and the delays are very small. The performance is really good with ACI.

But ACI has its own shortcomings such as not having very strong native support for security. Customers always have to look into third-party security solutions to implement good security within their software-defined data centers. If you compare it with NSX, NSX comes with the Distributed Firewall and the Edge Firewall. It has its own native security. This is where ACI lacks a lot because you have to implement contracts and filters. It's a very tricky part. You have to be very careful when implementing the contracts. If you make a little mistake, it can cause a good amount troubleshooting time to debug the issue. That's the missing part.

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 assistant vice president. My role involves product management, presales, and delivery of Cisco ACI. We have deployed the solution on-premises and in the cloud. We have different verticals, UIs, and data centers. We consolidate the data center on the basis of region. The data centers are in different regions such as Apex, Europe, and the U.S. Recently, we have MSO connected to Cisco Cloud.

Cisco ACI is an automation requirement where they want to consolidate data centers. We wanted a hybrid Oracle solution where services can be monitored and managed from the cloud and equally can be deployed on-premises. From an application perspective, fifty percent can be moved to the cloud and fifty percent of the on-premises applications cannot be moved due to application restraints.

We use all the features provided by Cisco ACI including orchestration to layer seven, service training, load enhancements, and firewalls.

There are many bug fixes required with Cisco ACI. Whenever there is an issue, we raise it to their tech support and wait for a response. In the meantime, we come up with a version upgrade or patch upgrade so that it can be fixed. One concern we found after 15 days of troubleshooting was a multicasting issue. For many of the applications, we were using multicasting.

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.

I recommend that rather than creating individual stacks we are given some UI-based solutions. This type of functionality would allow us to create a tenant then click on bridge two, and then create it on a VR. Currently, we are using some scripts with help from Postman for migrations from a traditional data center to the cloud.

Over the past six months, I am more interested in the cloud and IoT. From a security perspective, I would recommend Cisco comes up with solutions for ACI and a portal perspective. 

The Apex GUI needs improvement, so end users can follow the proper steps without having to go through the guide, giving more flexibility to the GUI. This will ensure that the user can easily build the configuration.

I have been using Cisco ACI for six years.

Early on, Cisco ACI was not stable. As it matures, it improves. Integration is the biggest challenge with this hybrid solution. From a security perspective, it wasn't stable.

The maintenance of Cisco ACI depends on the project. We use different delivery teams or supporting teams on a project-by-project basis. We handle the delivery and implementation and in the back end, there is a third team that maintains operations.

This solution is scalable. We are system integrators providing solutions to our customers. Approximately fifty percent of our customers are using ACI. 

With experience and after training, the initial setup is not easy. An individual who is going to implement this solution needs some support at the start. 

Deployment depends on how many workloads there are. We migrated more than 300 VMs with the help of tech support. It took three days to complete.

I would rate the ease of setup a three and a half out of five.

We had training and support from Cisco and live enrollment. It was helpful. We followed the initial implementation strategy. It depends on the application structure, what type of application, and how the applications are combined on-premises. The types of services and the type of payment, AD DNS, are also considerations together with security services and how the communication is going to happen between the app and the native services like AD DNS. 

This requires us to work with the application team and complete our homework. We used Excel on a per-application basis. Using Postman, we upload it in the format. Usually, it's a subnet IP schema.

Anyone looking to implement Cisco ACI should look into the cloud features. Ensure you work with the skills you understand, and try to understand some programming to make the job easier. 

I would rate this solution between a seven and an eight out of 10.

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.

I am an engineer who deploys ACI. Most of the deployments cover L2 Out and L3 Out and migrations.

Some of our cloud-based customers integrate it with UCS Director or CloudCenter and are able to automate services. ACI supports automation, like Ansible automation or HTTP automation. It adds stability for cloud-deployment use cases. Cloud-based businesses don't need to create policies. They can do so with an automation orchestration tool like UCS Director or CloudCenter. A few customers are using it this way.

Some other customers are refreshing their data centers with SDN. They have a traditional data center but they want to restructure it. Cisco customers are now going for the Cisco SDN.

The most valuable features include

• microsegmentation
• L3 Out features
• the common tenant and tenancy model.

Regarding microsegmentation, generally, in Layer 2, there are restrictions between VLANs. When you do microsegmentation, by name, by IP address, or MAC address, you can create a microsegmented EPG and you can group within an EPG. Generally, all the endpoints that are part of an EPG can talk to each other. But when you create a microsegmented EPG you are creating restrictions.

Regarding the tenancy model, when you have a host data center and multiple customers and you want to build a dedicated infrastructure for a customer, you have to physically suppress the devices and you have to think a lot about security features. But with ACI, you don't need to buy a dedicated setup for each customer. Using one setup, you can create multiple tenants, and each tenant represents one customer. There are common services that are used by all the customers, like a DNS server or any web servers. You can keep the servers on the common tenant. In that way you can use the tenancy model efficiently.

They are still working on Multi-Site and Multipod but there are many customers that are looking for these in their Features page. 

We are having challenges with these features. For Multipod we need Layer 3 devices that support multicast. Customers ask: "Why can't ACI do that? Why do we need a dedicated Layer 3 device for this?" If they go for Multi-Site there is no need for that, ACI can do it. So Cisco needs to increase the Multipod features in ACI.

For one customer we found CloudCenter doesn't support Cisco Multi-Site scenarios.

I feel the stability is very good. We have had some issues but the support we get from Cisco is always good.

In terms of scalability, you can go with the two-spine and get very good bandwidth, but if you need more than this you can increase the spine count. If you need more devices you can increase the leaf count. Scalability is there.

I have been a bit disappointed with technical support from Cisco. They will often take some time to respond. But once they start they are okay. I feel they need to improve their service.

The initial setup is very straightforward. If you have some basic knowledge you will be able to deploy ACI. Some of the guys feel that it is a little complicated but if they understood tenancy more and the object structure, they would be easily able to deploy ACI.

We can deploy everything in less than two days. The difficulty is that we are working in data centers so we need to look for downtime for the customers. If they are using automation we can deploy everything in a single day. If we are doing manual, it can take three or four days.

But in real scenarios, customers cannot always give us downtime. They tell us to wait for some time and they do migration one by one.

On my team, I am the only one who does deployment. We don't need anybody's help for migration. But we expect a few team members to be involved on the customer's side, people from the server team and the network team, because we need support from them.

Maintenance is very easy. If there are two spines and you are doing an upgrade, you can shut down one spine and do the maintenance. Once that is done you bring up the one you shut down and do the second spine, and similarly for all leaves and all APICs. There is no impact to the server base and zero downtime.

I would rate ACI at ten out of ten. I don't see any bad features in it. I always think about the positive side. I don't see any negativity on the ACI side. There are a lot of features, like automation, that reduce manual efforts that would otherwise be time-consuming.

Our primary use case is Multi-site architecture. We run three data centers with Cisco ACI Multi-site, so the interconnections of these three sites are made with ACI.

It has reduced our day-to-day operations by at least half.

• Its simplicity
• It can be automated.

The user interface (UI) should be made easier.

I would like to have a multi-cloud environment, but I just read that Cisco ACI Anywhere is about to be released.

At the moment, the stability is very good. A year and a half ago, sometimes things went wrong with it.

We chose Cisco ACI because of its scalability.

Their technical support is as good as their other products.

We were looking for an automated solution and decided to build from scratch with Cisco ACI.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We used Maticmind, which is an Italian system integrator and Cisco partner. They are very good.

We chose ACI because we have worked with Cisco for a long time and felt that there was no reason to change at the time.

It is a great product. We have not encountered any problems so far. Cisco is very good to work with, and I am really happy with this product.

I would advise to go with Cisco ACI.

It has helped to improve our organization in the automation front. We integrated it with vCenter and Microsoft Hyper-V. 

Currently, we are not on the cloud. We have a private cloud deployment.

The most valuable features are the automation with the different systems for the software development and the ability to provision switches in hours rather than days.

Automation is the main criteria why we chose to go with this solution.

Cisco ACI needs to add more analytics and automation. 

It is stable but we have faced some problems with troubleshooting. 

There are no issues with scalability. We can easily scale. 

The solution's technical support is good. They help us with the operations. 

We decided to go with this product because the Cisco solution had hardware and software built-in. VMware is in the virtual world and so we went with the hardware and the software in the same box.

The initial set up was complex. We had to deploy 120 leads. Migrating from Legacy Cisco network to ACI was complex. 

We also looked at VMware. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco ACI an eight. The reason is that troubleshooting has been a concern. When there is a problem, the downtime increases. 

Cisco ACI is a good product. If you're looking for automation, you should go for it. 

Our primary use case for Cisco ACI in our company is to have a central point to manage our network and to do API automation. Those are the two main focuses to automate.

Currently, we're still doing a POC on Cisco ACI. We haven't made the transition. It's a huge jump from what we currently have in our network to the ACI. We're still evaluating it. 

We've already purchased the gear, but we still need more training. We already purchased all the hardware for the production environment. 

We want to keep on training before we make the migration phase.

The most valuable feature of the solution is having a central point to log in. I have a simple dashboard that has all my devices connected. That is what I'm looking for.

For stability, it seems fine. I have no complaints about that.

It's easy to keep adding. You have a set where you just add another leaf to your ACI fabric. 

I can scale quite easily. Just add another leaf to my ACI fabric. It seems straightforward.

I've not used the technical support. I've been working with our Cisco reps and a few professional service providers. They are amazing, number one. 

Their main office is walking distance from my company's office. I can just walk over and complain. It's good having face-to-face relationships.

We are a Cisco shop. Right now, SDN is a buzzword. The next evolution for our company is to have an SDN network. Since we're a Cisco shop, it's ACI.

We've been a Cisco shop since day one.

The initial setup is not straightforward at all. Cisco just released a document that tells you how to set it up, but before that, it was overwhelming. 

To set up, Cisco ACI takes months. There are so many features and you're too scared. They did release a pdf that shows you a step through, i.e. how to set up your ACI fabric. Before that, there's just bare-bones information for something so expensive. It was kind of funny. They just released it.

My complaint about this is: We purchased the ACI gear, but to do monitoring, to do stats, to do telemetry statistics, etc. we have to purchase another product from Cisco. 

I would ask from Cisco when we purchase the hardware if some of these features could be built in the purchase. Now I'm dissatisfied that I have to purchase this to do basic monitoring. It should all be built in.

We did not evaluate other options because we'd have to reevaluate what we currently use for Cisco. None of our staff is trained for anything but Cisco. Cisco was the only product we looked at.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco ACI with a nine. Some of the features should be built in. If you think you know ACI, you don't. Get more training.