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Cisco ACI vs Micro Focus Network Virtualization [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco ACI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Network Virtualization (2nd), Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd), Cloud and Data Center Security (8th)
Micro Focus Network Virtual...
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Sulaiman Olubiyi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Automation Engineer at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Network automation has simplified secure multi-site connectivity and reduced daily operational effort
I believe Cisco ACI could improve by incorporating something related to agentic AI, where it can execute tasks based on particular evaluations or loop engineering, enhancing fault identification or suggestions based on each tenant's configuration. Additionally, I think they should ensure that the documentation is comprehensive. I appreciate that Cisco provides documentation, and their support engineers are helpful in case of any issues. In terms of governance and security regarding Cisco ACI's AI capabilities, I think what we call evals or evaluations is important, whereby the engineer can evaluate the functionalities of the AI in Cisco ACI, preventing it from making deletions or modifications on its own. Therefore, there should be evaluations or guardrails incorporated into the development capabilities. Regarding accuracy and reliability of output for Cisco ACI's AI capabilities, it hasn't met my expectations. What we need is something called RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation. If Cisco can implement that to utilize customer-specific data instead of general knowledge, while ensuring data privacy under GDPR laws, I think that will result in very good, reliable output.
it_user567705 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT And Digital Platform Manager at Exemplas
It is flexible and scalable, giving us room to grow.
They'll be restricted by their legal requirements in terms of what they can actually do in order to source, but I would strongly recommend they talk to a variety of partners to find a decent partner that they trust and will get good customer service from. Get advice, and kind of go from there. Which I think is one of the reasons why the HPE partner program is so important because it gets that message across and gets the quality of the product across.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cisco give us a very high level support and technical information."
"In principle, what we are looking for is to have one gigantic tool which can be programmable, making our lives easier in terms of troubleshooting and management."
"The best part of ACI is that it can integrate with a lot of virtual environments like VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM."
"One of the most valuable features is centralized management. The other is the ability to create policies by routing."
"I like features like policy control and micro-segmentation."
"Before we started using Cisco ACI, everything was essentially flat open access, and by using ACI, we're able to segment out everything and get more visibility into our virtual environment."
"The good thing about ACI is its integration with the different hypervisors, as it supports VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM and can integrate with the virtual environment of Hyper-V, VMware, and KVM very well while its automation also helps deploy and do the integration very easily in the virtual compute part of the network."
"There are a lot of features, like automation, that reduce manual efforts that would otherwise be time-consuming."
"This solution allows us to offer a solution for the application, including all the things they need."
"In terms of consistency of delivery, this solution gives us room to grow as well."
"It goes through about 1.3 billion libraries on any scenario, any bandwidth, and any network condition you could think of."
"Network Virtualization allows us to test virtually instead of placing load generators somewhere else in the world."
 

Cons

"The learning curve is long. It's very difficult to learn Cisco ACI, and as a result, our customers usually have difficulty working with this solution."
"Operationally complex without a Cloud Management Platform to push policy, which is true for any network virtualisation solution."
"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."
"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."
"ACI is not simple by any stretch of the imagination, but the initial go-at-it is pretty straightforward, which is nice."
"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."
"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 initial setup of this solution is not straightforward. We had our standard configuration running, but when we moved to ACI it was a completely different dimension."
"We haven’t had experience with scale yet."
"They need to go beyond what they are doing right now and look at streaming capabilities because a lot of news organizations, a lot of media and entertainment companies, need a lot of streaming support."
"One of the really good options of the SDN on DCN is the micro-segmentation. I would like to see it act more like a real firewall."
"The reporting could be a little bit better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 cost could be decreased."
"This is an expensive solution."
"Yearly, we pay around one point two million for the solution."
"It saves time and resources."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The product is not cheap."
"I don't believe there is any licensing required."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise89
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco ACI?
Cost is one thing that could be improved, as it is heavy for an emerging market like ours.
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Also Known As

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Shunra, HPE Network Virtualization
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University
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Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Cisco, ZeroTier, Inc. and others in Network Virtualization. Updated: October 2026.
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