Cisco ACI

Easier data center "segmentation"

Centralized Management

Well-suited for Automation

Concrete documentation

GUI refresh

Better compatibility with VM's

Dependency

VMM integration.

Inter-site (data center) communication.

Redirect Traffic for other devices like Firewall and Service load balance.

Contract visibility (hit).

Summary top of interfaces utilization.

Summary top of interfaces error.

Management of various devices.

Quick implementation and easy to configure.

Automation service.

Network administration.

Difficult to contact support.

Integration with vCenter

Integration with cloud

Legacy server connections

Automation

Initial learning curve is high

Multi-site doesn't work well

Integration with VMWare is extremely simple.

Creating and crafting policies to meet specific criteria is very straight forward.

Alerts, notifications, and information about the system make troubleshooting issues simpler.

Having the ability to create more specific security rules or access rules would be nice.

Better documentation on the concept of "contracts".

Manage multiple devices easily.

Visibility for local data centers and public or hybrid clouds.

With ACI the network can be provisioned in a matter of minutes.

At first it is very difficult to understand the whole interface.

It is very expensive compared to other solutions.

Powerful

Centralized management

Traffic optimization

PBR missing

Integration only with VCenter

Network segmentation

Future-proofing network

Speed to implementation

SDN architectures are constantly evolving so there's a need to upgrade constantly

Some legacy architecture features are still in process of being brought in to ACI

Support can be difficult due to changes

API calls for appdev

Targeted routing

Microsegmentation

Troubleshooting

Searching for an IP or DNS name

Showing path through ACI for data flows

The APIC controller is a really powerful tool within the ACI stack.

Write once, deploy every where from a single command is key to driving efficency.

The ability to use 3rd party tools to supplement ACI is also key.

Cost is always a challenge and ACI is no different.

The linkage between ACI and Tetration has been rebranded since the initial marketeering of it and this has caused confusion and in some cases diminished the business case as a result.

The fact that Cisco has developed multiple Orchestrators of their differing network stacks causes issues when trying to pull together a singular approach to orchestration across a Cisco e-2-e network in an Enterprise.

Application-centric network policies

Data-model-based declarative provisioning

Cisco ACI inventory and configuration

More seamless integration with 3rd party vendors (vmware, Hyper-V, )

More integration with Integration with CI/CD tools

Cisco applications and plugin market that will help with external integrations for data center automation

Security being at the heart of Cisco ACI made it the perfect choice.

The web management GUI is intuitive and feature rich.

Troubleshooting and fault finding facilities are excellent.

Some parts of ACI are very complex to understand and implement.

Upgrades are complicated and difficult to implement.

Third Party Support is hard to come by.

Automated deployment of the network

Microsegmentation inside of VLANs

Better monitoring options

No redundancy in the deployment (if an error is deployed it's everywhere at the same time)

Complete change of mind of the network operations team needed

Very complex deployment if done manually (needs automation)

Simplicity of automation

Speed and ease of deployment

Learning curve, new approach to doing things

Finding people with experience and skills in the market

Layer 2 across all pods

Configure many switches with a few clicks

Stable data center networking

V center plugin missing for HTML5 client

Renaming objects is not possible

Interaction is a little slow sometimes.

Easy to sell

Easy to configure via single dasboard

Ideal for private cloud & trusted locations

Interoperability of physical and virtual workloads

Takes a while to learn to use - has some new approaches

Application visibility could be better

Not enough experienced people that can drive the tech

Easier to segment a data center to add security.

Centralized management.

Ability to group EPGs together (more than one preferred group or vzAny) to reduce contracts.

Need a firewall to harness the full power of ACI, hard to play only with contracts.

Automation

Visibility

Integration and micro segmentation

We are still experimenting and have yet to reach this stage to give comments in this area.

VXLAN encapsulation and segmentation

Cisco Nexus 9k programmability with Puppet/Chef agents

Independence from the virtualization layer.

Brownfield architectures were introduced late

A better alliance with VMware

High-Speed DC networking.

Extremely well suited for automation.

Simple to add new switches in the DC.

The GUI needs to be simpler, it is good but many fields don't need to be filled in.

Spreading policy across multiple locations

Other tools, like Tetration and Cisco NAE, can give you more out of your all investments

Currently GUI is good (it wasn't that from the beginning of the product)

Blueprints for different installation scenarios

Still some improvement on GUI for troubleshooting

Ease of manageability and visibilty

Great foundation for container platforms (Kubernetes)

Scales REALLY well!

Integrations with SD-access

The APIC UI could be rewritten as a modern webapp

It can be difficult for someone with traditional networking expertise to start thinking in terms of applications

Allows for automated provisioning in the DC

Forces collapse of silos and encourages co-mingling of teams in IT

Telemetry around applications

The UI. To get large scale adoption we MUST make the UI a go-to console for traditional network engineers. It is getting better, but still needs improvements.

Best practices and more wizards to get the day to day items done.

Better training from real world installers.

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.

Getting users up to speed can be especially challenging. I'm not sure how much of that if culture related vs technical skills related, but it's something to keep in mind.

Along those same lines, engineers who have spent years in the trenches with Catalyst or Nexus environment may struggle with troubleshooting an ACI environment.

We've had some issues with user errors causing the fabric to go into a virtually unrecoverable state and TAC not always knowing how to fix it.

Hypervisor integration

Ease end-to-end troubleshooting

Improve security across the network

Easy multisite deployment

Public cloud providers integration