Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure review
Updated March 13, 2025

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

L2 connectivity between EPs and external router, managed by EPGs. VPC connections for servers.
3 pod cluster, 40 leaf switches.

Pros

  • Feedback on connection problems. Be it layer 1 through 4, it'll warn us when something is wrong.
  • Adoption of new topology. The way in which LLDP works together with the rest of the fabric makes this very easy.
  • Setting up VPCs. It's not difficult at all.

Cons

  • 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.
  • Pos: The time it takes to provision the changes we make in the infra. Out other business units can continue their work faster.
  • Pos: The stability of the platform as a whole. We never had an outage because of the system.
  • Neg: TCO is very high. We still need to buy new stuff when it gets too old.
I have not selected Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure. I only just started working with it. But speaking from a classical networking background, the possibilities are endless.
The use of LLDP for the discovery, followed by the adoption in the fabric is a breeze. I really like the way it 'just works.'
Sorry, it has not. Our organization is not that agile (yet).

Do you think Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) again?

Yes

It is a great tool to do full end to end automation within a datacenter. Also when integrating the physical routing and switching world with the connected hypervising platforms like esxi or docker.
If none of these integrations are possible, or when the mutations in infra are sparse, I think the price isn't worth it.

Using Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

4 - Network administration
3 - Knowledge of the represented networks for the connected endpoints. A deep understanding of the Layer 2 and 3 parts of the network stack is highly recommended.
  • Connectivity to connected applications
  • Providing a reliable fail-safe connection to the internet
  • An infrastructure with as little downtime as possible
  • The use of VPCs across different switches
  • Expanding the Layer 2 domain across multiple sites
  • Expanding with integrations towards vCenter
It's a gigantic project to switch to another vendor. It's cheaper to keep updating the current infrastucture.

Evaluating Cisco ACI and Competitors

Yes - Non ACI cisco products
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
Having multiple datacenters spread over a large campus environment, being able to stretch the Layer 2 domain, while still using the spine-leaf topology is great :D
We've priarily looked at centralized management from one pane of glass. Next time I'd also like to consider the use of centralized scripting from a non-proprietary solution towards 'non ACI switches'. That way, a large license gap cloud be avoided.

Cisco ACI Implementation

Expanding the ACI fabric to a new Pod was a breeze
  • Third-party professional services
Conscia
Yes - Design
Physical implementation
Base configuration
Migration
Cleanup of old environment
Not sure - Only project managers are taking care of change management. I only do technical work.
  • Legacy settings from brownfield implentation
  • Long organizational problems in getting everything going

Cisco ACI Training

  • No Training
The Cisco press books on ACI are a great help.
I can't say I'd recommend earning by reading the books to everyone. But for me it works great.

Configuring Cisco ACI

I'd say nearly everything is configurable. As long as everything works as you'd expect, I'd say its discouraged to turn knobs just for fun. But they are there if you need them.
Start by a good design. Think about the classical Layer 2 and 3 topologies needed in the datacenter and work off of that towards an ACI design.
Also, don't deviate too far form standards. For every exception, the chances of looking over something in a troubleshooting situation exponentially increase.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - the product does not support adding custom code

Cisco ACI Support

We useually get support from our integrator. If that doesn't work, we get TAC. Some problems they only fix with the suggestion to upgrade to the next major version. SMUs are not on the table.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Escalation required
Slow Initial Response
No, support we get from our Integrator, on per-hour basis. If they can't ifx it, it's up to TAC.
Yes - No. We were asked to upgrade to the next major version of ACI. Only after a long way, via the Cisco account manager, we were provided different hardware (that we initially didn't want to use) to fix the problem temporarily. All in all it took 2 extra months to implement a new pod, only because of a firmware issue that's not being fixed in APIC 5.3.
No, I can't.

Using Cisco ACI

You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Slow to learn
Lots to learn
  • EPGs
  • Deffenition of the BDs
  • Attachment of an EPG to an APS
  • Contracts in large environments

Cisco ACI Reliability

It perfectly integrates at our campus environment with multiple pods across multiple datacenters. It does this without any bottlenecks or problems in latency.
It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link.
Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
We havent encountered any situation where we were exceeding the backplane limitations, or the combined uplink limitations.

Integrating Cisco ACI

I've not yet had the pleasure of integrating.
We currently have not integrated ACI with other products.
  • ESX vCenter
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)

Relationship with Cisco

I've not interacted with the vendor myself.
The support with the last TAC case was not so satisfactory, otherwise our account manager shows decent empathy about our situation (won't change the undelying issue tho).
I dont negotiate with the vendor, that's my bosses job.
That's all up to my boss.

Upgrading Cisco ACI

Yes - Everything went as expected. The known bugs that were in the release notes were no problems in our environment.
It took us around 8 hours to upgrade all the hardware to the new version.
  • It was a minor upgrade for security reasons
  • New security features
  • The same experience as before the upgrade. We just want a stable environment.

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