Cisco Catalyst Center Review
June 12, 2024
Cisco Catalyst Center Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Center
We use it currently for software image management, so we push a lot of our updates to our switching gear, a lot of the access layer at the campuses, and then the campus cores. We plan on using it this summer to perform upgrades to our data center equipment. That's the 9606 cores and, we're going to use it on our edge, internet, transportation switches, stuff like that. So all data center gear will be upgraded through Catalyst Center.
Pros
- I want to hammer home this swim process. It is amazing how you can upgrade something. It does all the readiness checks for you, does all the compliance checks for you, and it eliminates a lot of potential human error. Maybe you won't copy a file correctly, maybe you didn't check your MD five hash properly. There's a lot of things that if you're doing 50, 60, 70 upgrades over the course of a week or two weeks, you might try to cut corners, or not intentionally, but just human error. You do something repetitive, maybe you skip a step with swim, there is no skipping a step. It checks compliance, it checks your iOS, you download your iOS straight from Cisco from Catalyst Center. It eliminates any fatigue that you might have whenever it comes to doing repetitive things for weeks on end.
Cons
- The one thing that we had to get used to was really breaking down our wireless. We integrated our 9800 controllers into it, and the breakdown of our tags being floor specific and not just being campus specific was a challenge for us. And so we had to create all new tags and it wasn't necessarily a problem, it just required a little bit redesign on our wireless. And so it would've been nice for us to be able to assign a tag to an entire campus versus a floor, but that's a small complaint.
- Yeah, I mean that last one for sure. The software independent of the hardware, I mean, it's just easy. They made it so easy to just, and fast and efficient to upgrade your entire organization within days, weeks, months. And you're not spending, your maintenance windows get a lot shorter. You can schedule more maintenance windows just because you know there's going to be some type of consistency with it and there's just, I'm sure there will be a hiccup one day, but there just hasn't really been too many issues with us using that product, especially for maintenance, window upgrades, things like that.
- Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
It did a lot of good things for us. But the capabilities that we used it for were just probably a lot of what we're using it for right now, which is upgrades and configuration pushes to all of our gear, but it doesn't have quite the robust features that I've learned about this week. So as far, I'm still pretty new in the network world. I've only been doing the job for seven years, so I've really only known Cisco products and I haven't reviewed anything outside of Cisco, but just from what I've worked on and they've all done what I've needed them to do. And with Catalyst Center it'll do even more.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst Center delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Center's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst Center live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Center go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Center again?
Yes
Comments
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