Cisco ACI Room for Improvement

Vasil Mitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
Telecom Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Cisco ACI, segmentation-wise, could be more flexible, which is an area for improvement. The solution could be improved in terms of macro or micro-segmentation for many access lists and contracts. The process becomes very messy in the end.

Cisco seems to have stopped working on the segmentation feature and just put in all the effort on Cisco Tetration, mainly to install the agent on the server rather than do it on Cisco ACI.

I'm slightly disappointed about Cisco ACI and ISE integration because Cisco stopped working on that, so if you have ISE, you can only integrate it with one cluster of Cisco ACI. On the segmentation side, Cisco ACI has many issues.

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Eyal Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Presales Manager for Networking/DC team at Malam-Team

It would be good if Cisco ACI had some cross-domain orchestrator that could rule all the pillars in the customer network or interconnect more easily with the compass environment.

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RK
Senior DGM at Bharat Electronics Limited

ACI's blade servers could be more flexible, and its storage interface is a little too complex because they use some third-party storage solution.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco ACI
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco ACI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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Ehsan Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at Synnapex

The integration has room for improvement. There should be a drag-and-drop interface for configuring the integration where you connect some arrows to boxes, and the system takes care of the configuration. 

Right now, they have something similar, but it's limited. You have to take care of some things yourself. That is one area that the solution can work on. It's easy now, but it's much easier in other solutions.

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SG
Post Sales Manager at Vcom Teachnologies

Customer support for ACI needs improvement. Many customers prefer HPE because their internal support is different and easier to integrate with existing networks. This lack of awareness of ACI's capabilities makes customers stick to traditional networking.

My customers' internal teams lack ACI expertise, so Cisco should provide training or offer end-to-end use case support.

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Farhan_Mohamed - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Solutions Architect at NTT Ltd.

Ideally, if it could be more aligned as a unit, it would be useful.

Compared to VMware, it needs more virtualization technologies. It cannot match that right now based on the hardware boxes that we use. It could be more virtualized. There is less flexibility as they have less virtualization.

The contract management could be better.

It needs to include log files.

The GUI could be better. The solution be more user-friendly.

We've seen a lot of trends in companies moving towards AI and cloud capabilities. If it could really focus on this area, it would continue to be a very good product. It would improve the cost-benefit of the product in the long run. They need to integrate with multiple cloud platforms. Better integration and compatibility across the board, in fact, would make it a better product.

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AS
Technical Marketing Engineer - Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Quality Assurance could be better, and there are a lot of bugs in each release. We discover these bugs when we upgrade the ACI environment, sometimes resulting in downtime. 

In the next release, I would like to be able to manage hybrid cloud networking. So currently, if you have an ACI environment running on-premise or Epic in the cloud, we can handle it with the NexSys dashboard. But if Cisco can integrate SD WAN-related features, through which we can do multi-cloud networking, that will be an awesome feature. It should be more flexible.

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MK
Datacenter & Infrastructure Senior Engineer at BMB

I can recommend that Cisco improve its execution. But keep in mind that ACI is the most convenient solution for Cisco, and it is developing every day, adding new features.

Additionally, keep in mind that you can integrate the manager or CCI and manage your remote cluster and data center from the ACI dashboard, which is another possible feature in ACI.

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VN
Data Center Consulting Engineer at Techrun Stock Exchange

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.

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Ehsan Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT at Synnapex

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.

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JM
Network Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AL
Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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RS
Manager Network & Communication Engineer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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. 

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DT
Sr Manager at Cognizant

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. 

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LS
Major Change Supervisor at Vodafone

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. 

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VP
Network Architect at Neev limited

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.

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Enric Cuixeres - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Information Technology at Leng-d'Or

The tool's initial deployment is complex and takes five hours to complete. 

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NS
IT manager at IRPC PCL

We faced some issues while configuring the microsegment. 

The solution should provide a visibility tool for troubleshooting.

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MasoudSabouri - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Consultant at Telcoset

I faced issues when upgrading venues and registering devices. For example, in some cases, you have to reinstall the AP from scratch. We tried that and were then unable to register devices. From the network engineering perspective, it's hard to configure from the GUI. We tried to adapt but it was difficult. You have to add AP numbers for validations.

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JS
Network Manager at California Department of Corrections

The ability for us to figure out the traffic flows, to enable some of the more segmentation parts of it, is really tough with what is built into ACI. It would be nice if it were part of it.

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KL
Solution Consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

One of the areas that need work is feature flexibility. If you want to do things like routing policies it's not cookie-cutter, however, you want to customize routing policies. It becomes a little bit more constrained due to the feature set, the routing policy feature set within ACI, doesn't allow for you to get very customized when it comes to, let's say, failover type scenarios. However, that's just an artifact of the product maturity. It's going to take some time before the product becomes mature and they have the ability to have more customized features enabled. At version 4.0, these features were not yet available. We ended up having to basically export the routing functionality, the more advanced routing functions, outside of ACI and just put it into the routing infrastructure around it.

The initial setup is not intuitive.

Technical support needs to be more helpful. It's rare that you get a knowledgeable person.

It would be nice for them to provide visibility at a cheaper price point. Visibility is something that everybody wants to achieve with their workload. One of the benefits of SDN is supposedly the ability to collect all that telemetry and correlate it to something that is actionable and meaningful. That's a key requirement, however, the bar is so high in terms of costs. In our environment, we opted out of it as it's so expensive, however, it would be nice, as, if you don't have visibility, then how do you properly segment your workload? The minute you start segmenting, you kind of cut off workload communication. If your goal is micro-segmentation and putting your workload into arbitrary silos, and if you don't have the visibility, then it will be very difficult to achieve. Therefore, if you don't have visibility and you want micro-segmentation and you don't want to pay, then ACI is not your solution.

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GR
Network Engineer at Direction des Systemes d'Information, Etat de Vaud

The only drawback that we are seeing is the user interface is still a little complex and difficult to use. It needs a more user-friendly interface. I do not use it daily. Every time that I have to go back and configure something, it is very difficult and confusing to remember how to do it and where the menu are located.

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Habi Darr - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Network & Security Architect at The Juice Plus+ Company

Cisco ACI would be improved by providing a cloud offering; otherwise, it risks becoming a niche product.

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MR
Network Engineer at Societe Generale

They need more documentation. Because when we hit an issue and searched on Google, we didn't find a lot of documents about the issue. Possibly because it's a new product.

We are deploying ACI, and at same time, we are testing migration from our old network. Our old next is Nexus, latest version, and we have a less load balancing and it's hard to migrate. We are hitting some issues, so maybe there is room for improvement.

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NF
Networking Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM

Its scalability and reliability capabilities should be enhanced.

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FJ
Chief Security Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The firewall has room for improvement because there is no central inspection yet on Cisco ACI.

I would like more integration with additional security solutions. 

The upgrade cycle has room for improvement.

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RD
Network Consulting Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

There is quite a learning curve at the beginning.

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MH
Lead Network Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

I don't have any new features that I need in Cisco ACI yet because we're still learning and making it work in our environment today. I don't have anything new. 

The one big challenge with it is Cisco going from a perpetual license model to a licensing model that is renewed every year. You pay a large fee to use stuff like this. That to me is one of our challenges.

Making training more available for all of our employees and not even at a cost would help. If you want this to be deployed to all the data centers everywhere it's got to be something that everyone can sit down and get training on. 

If you're going to try and operationalize it amongst existing staff members and even up-coming ones, it's not a simple thing to sit down and learn. 

I've been doing this for thirty-five years now. It's one of the most difficult things I've had to sit down and learn myself.

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Stephane Deroch - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Architect at Air France

The product needs to be more visible on the Internet and have the ability to be integrated into more software developments. For example, with Amazon, you can click and deploy SDN with firmware, but not with SDI. It needs simpler process to be deployed everywhere. 

The Multi-site is not easy to use. While Cisco has plans to change this going forward, for now, it is complex.

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PauloDiniz - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Leader - Data Center at YSSY & Co

I would like this solution to be integrated with Pure Storage.

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GR
Information Security Architect at Progress Software Corporation

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.

View full review »
IA
Network Consultant at Onstack Inc

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.

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SA
Director Design, Architecture & Security at Syntax Systems GmbH & Co KG

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.

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PK
Assistant Vice President at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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LC
Consultant Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

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.

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PI
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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FN
Network and Security Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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AD
IT Networker Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Cisco ACI needs to add more analytics and automation. 

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BJ
Senior Network Engineer

I am still not quite happy with the APIC GUI, since I am more of a CLI guy. I don't really use the GUI a lot. It would be better to introduce some wizards to guide you through the whole configuration process instead of clicking through a bunch of menus with no concrete path. It is too easy to forget one or another if you configure it this way. A wizard would be a great help.

We are still struggling with some design issues, but most of these issues will be fixed in the next release.

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MB
Network Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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SS
Senior Network Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of improvement, I would like to see some sort of way to baseline the system in a network-centric fashion. The way ACI works is that it is very application-centric but I think that a lot of people who I have spoken to that use it don't need all that application-centric focus. Cisco says you can do a network-centric approach but I want to do network-centric in my design and then have the system organize and set itself that way. That would be cool. I would like to see that. If you as the customer want a network-centric design, after you build that initial configuration and you go into the GUI for the first time and you decide which direction you want it to go in and you point it in a certain direction, then it builds out the infrastructure to accommodate that, that would be beautiful.

They are selling the system as application-centric. I think a lot of people, ourselves included, are not ready to approach it in that way. It's too many knobs to turn. It's great overall architecture, scalability-wise, has an easy configuration, central configuration, but there are too many knobs to turn.

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SA
IT Solution Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Where there is room for improvement from ACI is for Layer 2 and Layer 7 packages. Normally, when you're updating your ACI fabric or you're introducing new Layer 4 to Layer 7 devices and there are some constraints, there are some limitations. You need to check before you do it, as well as F5 load balances. When you are doing device packages you will not have the functionality of ASM. It's like WAF, web application firewalls. So you need to configure it manually. There is some room for improvement here.

The rest of it, for VMM domains, is improving. Cisco is introducing new features. I don't feel that it's unstable or it needs more improvement. But, for Layer 2 and Layer 7 packages, it still needs improvement. It needs quite a bit of work. 

Currently, we are using it in our test lab for Layer 4 and Layer 7 services. We are not using it in production. We are using unmanaged Layer 4 and Layer 7 devices. We are not using complete device packages.

I'm looking forward to something called Cisco Tetration. I have never worked on it but it's there now. It will map everything: What type of ports are communicated through between users and applications and between applications. It will map that on ACI automatically, at the ACI contracts level and the application level. It's like a big-data platform. It will understand the application. It will understand the port requirements, the security requirements, and it will perform some types of automation. Right now, ACI is lacking this. There's some intelligence within it but not much.

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DG
Technology Support Specialist at Fujitsu

One of the things that makes it a lot more complicated is the way contracts are handled in ACI. Contracts are like their own access lists. They can improve the setting up of contracts between devices a lot. It can be simplified. Because ACI re-invented something that's been working for so long - you can now have overlapping subnet - it gets really confusing when they say that you can use the same subnet for different VLANs.

They should make a standard list of best practices and that makes it easy for the people who are going to use it. That part alone, when they tried to remove subnet and VLANs, that's an integral part of networking which people have been used to for so long. They tried to remove it. I don't know why, but when they did that, it muddled up the concepts of networking, and people need time to adjust. That's why they have to put out a best-practice's guide, to make it easier for traditional-method people to adapt to ACI. 

Another area for improvement is establishing a Layer 3 Out policy. Accessing the internet is a bit complicated where, before, using Cisco devices, it was just one line of code. With ACI, it took us a few days, almost a week, to just figure it out using the GUI.

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MD
Network Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AJ
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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OB
Platform Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like Cisco to simplify the interaction of the controller. 

I would also like them to simplify the way you configure the Fabric. The process is quite complex. This can be a barrier to entry. For anything, where it should take two or three steps, you have ten steps.

It took quite a bit of time to learn how to use it. The learning curve is very steep.

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BH
Senior Network Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

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. 

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BB
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We designed it from scratch which contributed to the complexity. They should have better information about the deployment requirements.

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CB
Network Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The product needs to be simpler. There is too much complexity in ACI. 80 percent of its features are of no use to us. We could do with a simplified version.

I would like to see some of the roadmap products remotely working to satisfaction where we could actually deploy them for our customers.

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it_user1000944 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Security Engineer at Lutech Group

Previously, the product was a little tricky to use. However, it's now a well developed platform.

I would like to see the data center unification of Cisco ACI with Cisco DNA into a single platform to deliver the data center and campus sides.

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TB
Security Advisor at https://globalqart,com
  • Security and isolation based on the type of traffic
  • High level of resiliency.
View full review »
GC
Data Center Implementation Engineer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

There has not been a single implementation we have done where the client wants to use all the features that are in the product currently. Contemplating new features seems out of order. Every product can benefit from new features as long as they are desired and add functionality that is useful. Most of the features that are there now are good and Cisco is doing a really good job at staying ahead of the curve with their competition. They are implementing new features before companies are even ready to use them or know that there might be a need for them.

Figuring out how to implement the product for clients is the area we struggle with the most every day. Perhaps an enhancement would be artificially intelligent solutions, but that would be further down the road.

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AD
IT Evolution Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Interoperability with third-party products always seems so straightforward, but every time you need to invest a lot to add an external element to the ACI Fabric technology. A good improvement would be to have an easier integration with external building blocks in the customer's environment.

Biannually, there is a new design delivered by Cisco. Thus, you are always running behind the new design, and it never stops. With Cisco ACI, this has been a nightmare. I recommend that they provide more customer focused blueprints to fix this. They should try to learn and understand what are the real needs of each customer.

Now, we are running behind releases. However, with each new release of a new design, you have to test it and validate it. So, we aren't going operational, which is not good. This support was not offered to us with the product.

I would not want to see any additional features at this point. We have had enough additional features. We still have a lot to learn and don't want anything extra.

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RK
Solution Architect

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.

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EG
Network Engineer at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

I recommend to customers that they meet a knowledgeable vendor to help them with it.

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KC
Network Engineer at CS Computer Systems

If I was a customer who is using the ACI to run my network, I would like for there to be more information about it available. While using the ACI in the graphical interface, I would like if there was something that explained every step that you can click and it will tell you what you are doing in more detail. For me, I understand what's happening because I did a course, but the problem will be when our customers, who are not so versatile in this, start using it and won't know what's going on. If it works it's fine, but when they run into problems, then it's gonna be an issue. If everything works, it should be fine but if any issues come up, a lot of Cisco services will be needed.

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HS
Network Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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

It is quite expensive.

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MW
Assistant Director IT at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see integration with Tetration. You should be able to use Tetration to manage your scripts and push into ACI without having to export, manually manipulate, script it, and then re-import back in ACI. It needs automation there.

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DG
Director of Network and Security at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see a lot more integrations with the rest of the Cisco portfolio. I would like to have ACI embedded into HyperFlex, as an example.

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JB
Systems Network Manager at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

ACI is not simple, by any stretch of the imagination.

We are not following the application-centric approach, but a network-centric approach instead. It would be nice if I could specify network-centric in my design, and the system would organize and set itself up in that way. Essentially, once you go into the GUI for the first time it would prompt you, and it would build out the infrastructure to accommodate your choice.

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PC
Sr. Voice Engineer at SGWS

The CLI needs to be improved.

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RV
Systems Engineer at a tech services company

The interface is sometimes slow. I receive a lot of weird errors when I try to install apps, such as contract apps, which should give me a nice visualization of all the contracts. However, it just doesn't load, etc.

I would like more thought put into the way the graphic part of the monitoring is rendered. When you have a lot of contracts, you can't understand the graphics because they are so loaded.

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PS
Network Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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AW
Network Specialist at a comms service provider

Because this is new technology, which requires a different way of thinking, it can be hard to understand. Therefore, I would like more documentation or education.

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ML
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I haven't been using the product long enough to really be looking for additional features as I haven't exhausted learning about the features that are available.

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BE
Network Manager at a university with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see simpler contract building, engineering, and architecture.

There should be an alternative "ACI Light" solution for smaller-sized enterprises.

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NK
Sr Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

They should improve the GUI, make it simpler. They also need to improve its integration with other automation tools.

In terms of additional features, I would recommend of PTP support, which they have yet to come out with.

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GD
Specialist Lab Network at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would like for ACI to manage all of the devices. 

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MD
ICT Expert at Orange Polska

We would like to have faster services and problem monitoring for our customers.

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JP
Senior Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see more troubleshooting apps.

There should be more and better SNMP monitoring.

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TM
Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

I wish that if I had to open up an additional tab, I wouldn't have to log in every single time. That would be a feature I would like.

For the licensing model of the system, I still have not gotten another update after eight months. It's telling me I'm not licensed even though I'm told I am by my reseller.

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EC
IT Network Engineer at MANGO

I would like to see better training. I don't have good training with this product. If I did, I probably would be able to solve all of the problems during the installations. 

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DR
Network Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The areas for improvement are automation and user-friendliness.

If I lose the connection from one side to the core, I can't use the other side to go to the core. I hope in the future, this will be fixed.

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TM
Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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EK
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

With the first setup, it was complex because of the terminology. We were clicking around because we did understand the API console. The hardest part was to make something scalable and easy to use in the future without having any prior knowledge. It was hard, which is why we used consultants with the setup to provide us advice.

We did have problem with APIC, but we didn't even notice it. We changed it with no impact.

We are waiting to see what happens with the cloud. We want to see if it will scale better. Also, we want to see how they will be moving to the cloud. At this time, we don't know.

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PJ
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is more about resolving bugs early on in the code. Otherwise, as the product gets more mature and those bugs get discovered sometimes by the customer, then Cisco will resolve them.

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it_user302127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's very new, so there's lots of bugs, and it's only good for testing with PoC customers. We're the first Canadian customers for this product.

Infrastructure and logic should have a better connection. There's too much linkage and it's easy for people to get lost.

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NP
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

They should make it easier for the network people to do automated solutions. 

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MC
Network Engineer at BPCE Infogérance & Technologies

The ACI user interface is complex and Cisco should improve it.

We had to take time to learn the product, as it is quite complicated to understand.

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RG
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.


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SA
Senior Network Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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VD
Pre-sales Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It needs to be able to function on the cloud.

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DK
IT Network at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

The error messages should be improved. Sometimes we want to remove an error message so we acknowledge an error and we would then like to remove it but there's no real way of doing that. If we need to do it, we need to open a tech case. That could use improvement. 

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AH
Sr. IT System Administration at a government with 10,001+ employees

Technical support needs improvement. I can get stuck with a rep who will just have me scan the logs to look for the problem. I think that technical support tickets should be escalated sooner. 

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SP
Principal Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see a smoother transition from existing systems. The configuration from what we had earlier, compared to ACI, is completely different. 

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AH
Network Engineer at a political organization with 10,001+ employees
  • 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.
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PM
Network Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see more integration with other Cisco products.

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AM
Project Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It needs more features for integrating with third-party vendors.

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AS
Cloud Advisory Consultant at Accenture

It needs more integration with public clouds, like Azure and AWS.

There are some setup issues that need fixing.

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Buyer's Guide
Cisco ACI
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco ACI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.