Likelihood to Recommend It is very well suited to act as your aggregator / core switch for mid to large facilities. it is flexible enough to really be useable in small environments but costs may hinder that. It has redundancy of power and management blades that does add a lot of peace of mind and security. Really the only reason you would not use a 9000 series is frankly cost and/or real requirements for performance. They have several versions of this model, plus they have an entire set of lines that can accommodate nearly as much as the 9000. Less demand or less of a budget can weigh in the decision to select this particular model.
Read full review If you just need to do simple communication to Azure such as smb and rdp sessions then the Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V Series is overkill. If you need to setup multiple mesh vpn connections to existing ISRs and have complicated routing with multiple protocols then Cisco Cloud Services Router makes that setup much easier and less work to maintain and troubleshoot.
Ryan Lee Enterprise Infrastructure Supervisor
Read full review Pros [Cisco 9000] Series [Aggregation Services] Routers are exceptionally reliable when compared to other market options. One strength of Cisco routers, in general, is their compatibility with any standard market tools from other vendors. [It is] unmatched in terms of sheer performance. [It] comfortably supports very strong throughput requirements. Read full review Easy and available to download with a CCO account. Full-featured router platform. Can run as many instances as you have memory to handle. No issues so far running in VMWare player 14.0. Read full review Cons [The] upgrade process [is] overly complicated compared to NX-OS or IOS. New images and the current configuration need to be compiled into "golden IOS's". If you don't include the configuration, you will have a clean device with no configuration. [There are] major bugs in every release. We have had to cycle through all of our routers 3 times in the last year for updates due to show-stopping bugs that did not come to light until after the changes were made in production. [It has] terrible documentation. You have to mine their site to get to any documentation for recent versions of IOS-XR. If you make the leap from 32-bit cXR to 64-bit eXR, then the documentation is more or less non-existent. Due to the internal architecture of hardware itself, technical specs can change from software version to software version, so don't expect any sort of firm scalability numbers. You'll have to rely on your sales engineer for that. Read full review More integration with the switching A dynamic approach for software updates More automation features and APIs Read full review Likelihood to Renew This depends on when Cisco EOL the product.
Read full review Usability [I am] always impressed with Cisco products, from the functionality to the customer support.
Read full review Support Rating In some ways, the platform is a big improvement over our previous IOS and NX-OS devices: They offer version-controlled configuration staging/commits. They have a robust portfolio of network protocols and features even beyond datacenter devices. Due to the use of NPUs instead of relying entirely on ASICs for forwarding, new versions of the software are able to improve hardware performance and capacity. Unfortunately, I have run into more bugs on IOS-XR than I ever did on IOS or even NX-OS (which has a shocking number of bugs of its own) and you have to be a licensing guru to get your order right the first time.
Read full review Alternatives Considered When we are integrating the ASR9000 router with other devices then there should be the same device that can cater to the throughput. We can use the Cisco 9600 Switch which can be easily integrated and can handle the speed in terms of uplinks 40G can be handled. Adding to this
Cisco DNA Center can be integrated to do the automation and monitoring purposes.
Read full review Neither product supported all the protocols we needed to allow all of our locations to route. It does add some complications to the gateway and vnet setup though. Once we retired our ISRs we were able to go to Meraki vMX and the auto-vpn setup works rather well and is much simpler than IOS configs
Ryan Lee Enterprise Infrastructure Supervisor
Read full review Return on Investment We didn't need to buy new devices when we were increasing backbone capacity from 1G to 10G. Due to the modular nature of the software, when there is an issue with any running services, we need not reboot the whole device which affects all clients and availability. Read full review As this is available on AWS workplace, it's easy to configure and implement Absolute worth for money, easy ROI With the Cisco global support model, this becomes very easy to configure and troubleshoot and becomes part of my overall asset list License management could be simplified and made more cost-effective Read full review ScreenShots