Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) Review
February 25, 2025
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) Review
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
So ACI basically means Application Centric Infrastructure to mean that the network is centered around the application and so we did a migration in 2023, so that was our firsthand use of the product. So we are still in the very infant stage of the project, of the product, so we use it as a network completely at layer two for our network. We've thought about integrating layer three functionality functionalities to the product we haven't done yet.
Pros
- Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
Cons
- ACI, the object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
- The positive one, I mean because before the Catalyst 9800 wireless hand controller, there was another version, I can't remember the name. It was quite, the web UI was very not up to date, but with the 9800, it was a pretty web view user interface. Nothing there was also integrated some API where you could make API calls to the 9800 to configure it. That was a positive negative. I can't think of anything really negative about it.
I've used the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller 9800. I was quite surprised. It was very good to manage access points in a campus network setup that was good. There's a Cisco SD Access solution that I use. I forgot the name of it, to manage also the campus. It was also good. Yeah, I've used quite some Cisco product, but the one I can remember was the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller 9800.
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?
No
Did Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) again?
Yes
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