Recommendations to others considering Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI):
I would strongly recommend against it, under most circumstances. Even if you've already invested in the hardware I would strongly advise you to consider using a tool like Ansible and running the switches in Native mode to accomplish much of what the APICs are able to do by configuring the accomplish. About the only thing you wouldn't be able to do that ACI allows you to do is the Application Centric Model and the Tenants/App Profiles/End Point Groups, but we've run into so many issues along the way with ACI at multiple companies with large and talented networking teams that I feel like it's a small trade off. The Application Centric Model of networking is useless if the network is constantly down/having major issues/impacts to you and your customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems is Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automating network deployments is fairly straight forward once you have the original recipe down, but the same can be done with other automation tools such as ansible on traditional networking equipment or even the Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches in native vxlan mode. The benefits aren't really anything compared to what I've also been able to do using Ansible and traditional networking models. The argument is often made that it gives you an additional layer of security using tenants, app profiles, end point groups, and policy. But the unfortunate reality is that the resources allocated for the security policy are extremely limited and again I've run into scaling issues here. You can carve us the CAM differently to address this by switching to a different "Forwarding Scale Profile", but you only have so much CAM to reallocate for the various tasks (routing IPv4, IPv6, & Security Policies) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
