Cisco ACI

The integration with VMWare is very useful because the Vcenter can be managed from the APIC. Port-groups and even VDS can be created from the ACI administration.

Provides the basis for ACI to run

Through creating run books and using Ansible Tower to automate the deployment of them on to ACI has seen a real efficiency step change within the customer estate. The customer has also integrated their FTD estate into the ACI fabric as part of their security strategy to connecting to 3rd parties.

Our organization has various multi-vendor virtualization platforms and the fact that ACI can be integrated into all of them is very beneficial. It helped to smoothly and seamlessly migrate from the legacy data center to ACI. Also, using Cisco and third-party automation tools make management and maintenance quite efficient.

We have been able to implement service insertion Cisco ASA firewalls directly into the fabric, to allow extra security around traffic that is allowed between two end points. This allows load balancing and traffic inspection from layer 4 upwards, rather than just relying upon the layer 3 security baked into Cisco ACI itself.

We integrated the Cisco Firepower Firewall in the SDDC. The firewall and the ACI controller exchange the EPG information. The EPGs are then configuration objects on the firewall and are always up to date.
We integrated ACI with Splunk which gives users a much better monitoring experience then we have with SNMP traps with the legacy network.

Most of our client networks are legacy and are not a spine and leaf topologies, they are traditional three-tier networks. Cisco ACI is compatible with these networks and easily accommodates them by easily integrating, usually at the aggregation layer. Integrating with the Cisco ACI fabric provides our clients with same advantages of policy automation and visability as well as a path to fully transition to SDN.