We performed a comparison between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco ACI is a solid, robust solution but can be complex to understand and manage for users not familiar with the Cisco ecosystem. VMware is considered a solution that is easy to learn and manage and offers great security with a distributed firewall. This added security and micro-segmentation make VMware NSX a trusted, complete value-added solution.
"The most valuable features are the ease of setup for redundancy, as well as centralized control."
"ACI's most valuable feature is sizing - you can easily find the sizing of the data, which means the data speed, CPU, and virtualization can be determined."
"The ability to integrate with other systems is the most valuable feature."
"The operation and maintenance costs have been reduced. It is also simple to deploy any deployment. Any configuration can be easily done."
"It is a complete re-write of everything that you've ever thought of from a networking standpoint."
"We can support policy based on our intent, then that gets rendered into the policy that we will be using for Fabric."
"Having a lot of racks and switches with a single point of configuration which can be done with automation on one platform using one API. This makes everything work faster."
"Virtualization and integration with VMware is the most valuable feature."
"The micro-segmentation and the ability to create policy rules are valuable."
"The most valuable features are ease of use and user interface."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the ability to set up virtual networking environments."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the high bandwidth."
"It's a beneficial tool."
"The installation is straightforward, it took a couple of hours."
"The best part is the blueprint creation where I can create their things and then move on to the target environment."
"The most valuable features are security and dynamic routing."
"I would like to see the data center unification of Cisco ACI with Cisco DNA into a single platform to deliver the data center and campus sides."
"From my point of view, troubleshooting issues relating to ACI can be a little bit complicated to perform."
"Its graphical user interface (GUI) is not as user-friendly as it could be."
"The challenging thing about Cisco ACI was we had to put a lot of effort into providing the customer the full picture, new standards, and new technology that they had to use. This was more challenging than deploying the product."
"We would like to have faster services and problem monitoring for our customers."
"The first setup was difficult because it is a very different discipline than other traditional network deployments. The terminology is very different, so the first time can be difficult."
"Cisco ACI is a highly complex solution. The initial deployment is just a few clicks, but understanding how an ACI works and interacts with routing, switching, and virtualization takes a lot of knowledge. The interface isn't necessarily hard to use, but the technology is complicated. If you want to understand how it works and how to configure it, you should study hard."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. ACI was just out at that time, and there wasn't support at that time."
"It needs to be cheaper."
"Everybody needs a network to connect to, and VMware doesn't readily provide one."
"Its licensing model could be VM based."
"Despite being somewhat behind in the cybersecurity field, VMware should develop a cloud and a red team to continuously monitor for new malware and ransomware."
"It still needs to grow. There are still some features that it doesn't do, like it doesn't do multicasting."
"The price could be better. The non-enterprise version of the product should also be improved. I would like VMware to expand beyond the network and provide some VLAN technologies and more. I think we have one, but it's more on the distribution side because it's more on the upper side of the network. I'm looking forward to that."
"The training costs a minimum of $3,000, which is expensive and should be reduced."
"The feature it can improve is essentially application-based load balancing with intelligent load distribution for applications that require redundancy and high availability."
Cisco ACI is ranked 1st in Network Virtualization with 97 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 2nd in Network Virtualization with 94 reviews. Cisco ACI is rated 8.0, while VMware NSX is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco ACI writes "Stable, easy to extend, scalable, and has a host-based routing feature". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware NSX writes "Allows for seamless micro-segmentation and the support is exceptional". Cisco ACI is most compared with Cisco Secure Workload, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Nuage Networks, Juniper Contrail Networking and HPE SDN, whereas VMware NSX is most compared with Nutanix Flow Network Security, Illumio, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Workload and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security. See our Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX report.
See our list of best Network Virtualization vendors and best Cloud and Data Center Security vendors.
We monitor all Network Virtualization reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few.
-Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server where APIC software runs.
-VMware NSX doesn't have any physical network gear of its own, VMware NSX software runs on ESXi hosts(Any Vendor) & even NSX Bare Metal Edge runs on any Vendor hardware(check compatibility)
-Cisco ACI offers both Underlay & Overlay functionality
-VMware NSX is a software and it builds an Overlay tunnel for (VM/Container) communication on top of an already established IP network which can be build on hardware network gear (Cisco Legacy/ACI/Juniper etc.)
-Cisco ACI: To use micro-segmentation on a VM or Container level you will need some other Cisco products
-VMware NSX: Micro-segmentation can be done Out of the Box because DFW Distributed Firewall are applied on the vnic of a VM i.e. on the ESXi kernel.
Being different in many manners but they still define the SDN realm with L2-L7 Network services and what you choose over the other may depend on many other factors like what network gear you already have or if its Green or Brownfield deployment. For example if your infra already have something other than Cisco 9K switches and is well configured then it will make more sense to use NSX to make use of all the SDN functionalities. This is just an example not a recommendation.
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch. Cisco ACI can connect with both virtualized networks and physical networks.
As with many Cisco solutions, Cisco ACI has a steep learning curve. It is not user-friendly and most of our team would like to see a better GUI. It would be great if we could test upgrades in a simulation before implementing; this could save a lot of rework and downtime.
The key component for us with VMware NSX is the distributed firewall. VMware NSX can segment every application and server based on the ports with which they need to communicate. We can activate the ports we need and disable the ones we don’t. This really helps to keep things very secure and makes VMware NSX very flexible.
We would like to see VMware NSX integrate better with other open-source solutions; integration can be very complex leading many to simply choose not to use VMware NSX at all. We found some maximums can be very limiting, especially with very large environments. VMware can only be used with virtualized networks.
Conclusion:
Cisco ACI and VMware have many similar qualities and features. The fundamental difference is that Vmware NSX’s primary focus is on virtualized networks, while Cisco ACI can connect to both virtual and physical networks.
Vmware NSX can provide better levels of granularity and visibility into how your workload performs and functions. Cisco ACI does not provide this.
Because Cisco ACI is more robust and can handle both physical and virtual networks, Cisco ACI might be a more appropriate solution. At the end of the day, it really depends on your organization’s ecosystem and applications, features and utilities needed, and, of course, cost of implementation. You may need one of these solutions or both.