We use Cisco Nexus Series Switches on Cisco ACI. It helps to make new and easy connections. It will better if we can use Generative Artificial Intelligence with them.. We manage many domains in one place. We manage more than one company’s network, so Cisco ACI is really helpful.
Switching from NX OS to ACI OS made configuration easier after initial migration and getting to know ACI principles. There are no L2 loops and configuration mistakes as often as it used to be. There is only one management console, and policies are easily reused. The “Submit” …
We have made the decision for ACI over NX-OS for the following: - no more self-made configuration of the underlay network - ease of scaling out port capacity
Because it was quilcky to install and needed less people for the first install and automation. If we had the time I think we select the nxos with a vxlan fabric and automation like ansible but it needed to much time.
ACI is more mature compare to other cloud and fabric products. It's proven on the Cisco nxos and the engineers have the flexibility of knowing the system. Compared to the competition, TAC support is better for Cisco and the documentation covers good use cases. Power to extend …
Lower cost than FabricPath, maybe a little bit cheaper than Arista when we looked into it. I wasn't involved in the initial purchasing of ACI, and was kind of against it at first, but the product has evolved a lot over the last few years and I now believe that it can …
We just started deploying Cisco ACI to replace our Cisco Nexus infrastructure. The ACI platform allows us to do more with fewer devices, while expanding on features such as changing the Virtual Device Contexts to a better multi tenant platform. Additionally, we are able to have …
We are using both Arista 7280 and Cisco Nexus 9300 devices. Arista switches have deep buffer features and helps us for handling the big data packets. But these switches are a little bit more expensive than nexus 9300 switches. And also Arista 7050x Series can be competitive …
Well suited to data center deployments with storage and compute to host applications. When deployed with VMWARE and/or hyperconverged infrastructure you get a good solution that is reliable and robust and can support a vast array of solutions. Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure works on any sized solution however, it's more appropriate to mid to large scale deployments.
Fairly stable and easy to operate - but I haven't any experience with other brands, so I don't have anything to compare with. Fairly fast in the OS. Easy to upgrade - but with some SW issues. Sometimes clearing of log folders is needed. Access to bash is cool. Tips & cool tricks for operations could be nice to share.
The REST API allows your to programmatically interact with the network and make massive changes very quickly when needed.
The API allows you to tie together Server Provisioning tools, storage provisioning tools, into an orchestration platform such as Ansible to streamline new deployments and builds.
New Deployments are extremely simple once you've worked out your programatic deployment process. We can deploy new clients/tenants in seconds rather than days or weeks like it used to take.
Replacing failed switches/apics/etc is also extremely easy.
Tightly couple the underlying Network Infrastructure to VMWare Deployments to allow VMs to move anywhere in the datacenter at the drop of a hat.
Maintenance, upgrades, and software certification can be performed without service interruptions because of the modular nature of NX-OS and features such as In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) and the capability for processes to restart dynamically
FabricPath:
Enables each device to build an overall view of the topology; this is similar to other link state routing protocols. Each device in the FabricPath topology is identified by a switch-id. The Layer 2 forwarding tables are built based on reachability to each switch-id, not by the MAC address. Eliminates spanning-tree to maximize network bandwidth and flexibility in topological configurations, as well as simplify operational support and configuration. This enables a tremendous amount of flexibility on the topology because you can now build FabricPath topologies for Layer 2-based networks the same as for Layer 3-based networks
Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV): Enables the Layer 2 extension between distributed data centers over any transport Layer 3 network
The APIC web UI is slow. Even on the newer UCS systems it is laggy.
The terminology for some of the objects is really confusing for someone that never used Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. It would be at least helpful if there would be a link to a reference of the "classical" terms in the web UI.
The cost of the hardware, together with the management platform, is high. It is difficult to convince my management layer why the ease of manageability outweighs the high price.
Implementing jumbo frames on interfaces of its fabric extender series (N2k, etc.) by editing the network QoS does not have to be a global configuration that would affect all its interfaces. It can be improved to become just an interface configuration.
Licensing on the NXOS is a bit complicated and expensive. I understand that the Nexus is made for core data center switching but it does not have to break the bank.
OTV technology is for Nexus only. Based on the advantage of the technology, it should be made vendor-neutral to accommodate other vendor devices.
Cisco ACI is doing exactly what was intended for it to do, that is support our next generation data centre, improve security, and increase resiliency. Migrating to another platform would be a waste of time, resource and energy, which could be better spent migrating more legacy applications into the Cisco ACI fabric.
We will use it for a long time, since they are switches with great capacity and positive results, they promote the perfect operation of our data center, I always recommend them, because they are switches with good results.
Cisco ACI has changed the traditional data center model into a new era of automation and agility. The product was considerably easy to deploy met all the expectations. In terms of usability, ACI provides a unified interface for managing the whole infrastructure in one place which is the main benefit for users (admins)
In our environment (and especially during COVID and the Work From Home era), I would really like our network devices to be more resilient [against} errors in remote configuration. Having a standard, easy to use, configure, commit/deploy, rollback system should be installed, but it's not there. Other companies have been providing this for over 20 years, and Cisco does this on some of their devices. Why not all?
I do not give it 10 because the platform evolves more and more every day in the data traffic of the datacenter. But the implementations that they carry out for different clients of the platform are very happy with the result of the same over time. Another point that you notice about the platform, despite its good performance, is the low use of energy used by this 24x7 on, it is a good fact to take into account for our environment.
These switches are very fast. They've been designed to work within the data center. We connect them to Cisco UCS-B Mini servers with the storage being directly attached. They are able to handle the data traffic pretty easily. We can also move servers pretty fast from data center to data center without overloading them. This has allowed our company to stay running during any kind of conditional outage. We have come to really rely on them for business continuity.
Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
Overall, Cisco has great products and I believe that they believe in the philosophy of a great customer experience. Although there have been a few technical support issues that caused a lot of company anxiety, in most cases, Cisco has gone above and beyond in making a valiant effort to help the customer solve any issues.
The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
NSX-T and ACI both are definitely awesome products. I tend to use ACI in networks that have more barebone and/or alternative hypervisors. NSX still works best in VMware heavy networks. Another consideration is where the network is managed, by which team. If the network is solely managed by the network team ACI tends to be a better fitting solution. Also since ACI is a complete solution you don't need any other products. If you implement NSX you will still need a physical network.
The Cisco 9000 stacks up quite well against the Cisco Catalyst 3850 switches. The additional features available in the Nexus 9000, such as VPN, FCoE, 40 gigabits, give us the ability to support the future needs of the company in our data center. The Nexus 9000 allowed us to condense our core and aggregation environment that comprised of 2 Catalyst 6504 and 2 Catalyst 6509 to a port of Nexus 9000. Although the Catalyst 3850 would be sufficient to handle routing, those features in the Nexus 9000 made it the clear choice for us.
Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
The Nexus 3000 series switches are data center switches, so I would say they have similar security ability to other switches in this segment. I don't have a lot of experience doing more than basic ACL security on switches, but I know these can be integrated into other security solutions like Cisco ISE and 802.1x authentication. It could also be integrated into an ACI solution to add micro segmentation, which would bring in other security functions.
Positive impact moving off of legacy to ACI has shorten costs of operations.
Native support for automation makes deployment easier and takes few mins than large amount of hours that can bring costs (OT over time) since it takes minutes to deploy this OT cost has decreased.
Troubleshooting made easier, this gains customer trust, therefore we get to spend less time trying to solve an issue and less operations costs.
