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.
"It scales very well. When you increasingly scale with it, it makes the product easier to work with."
"We get a full holistic view of the ecosystem."
"The stability is perfect. We have had no problems with Cisco ACI."
"In legacy networks, managing changes requires individual tickets for each device. ACI's single pane of glass management through APIC is a big advantage. So, single-tenant management is a plus."
"In a very general way, the ease of access, ease of use, and ease of connecting the system is a valuable feature in itself. The solution doesn't really increase detection rates as that is not what it was created for. Threat prevention comes in from other devices that might be connected into the Cisco ACI that monitors external traffic. It maintains what end-of-life products would be doing and offers other opportunities to unify solutions."
"The ability to integrate with other systems is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Cisco ACI are micro-segmentation, the VXLAN, and the ACI flattening services."
"Once we have it running, it should be easier for us to program our IT rather than going case-by-case, by switches and different elements, or program it by hand."
"This solution comes with an API that can easily integrate with other solutions."
"Provides flexibility to deploy and have network virtualization on different types of firewalls."
"It has reduced the number of people on the network team along with the system engineer involved in the security process. So, it is valuable."
"I have found VMware NSX to be easy to use."
"It's a beneficial tool."
"NSX gives us the ability to put our network, NSX, onto any network there is, which allows us not to have to go to the network team to create networks our VLANs for networks."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to create, develop, and deploy servers in minutes to hours, rather than days."
"Provides protection for virtual machines."
"In terms of improvement, I would like to see some sort of way to baseline the system in a network-centric fashion."
"The user interface should be made easier."
"The ACI user interface is complex and Cisco should improve it."
"Technical support needs to be more helpful. It's rare that you get a knowledgeable person."
"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 are waiting to see what happens with the cloud. We want to see if it will scale better."
"The interface is sometimes slow. I receive a lot of weird errors when I try to install apps, such as contract apps, which should give me a nice visualization of all the contracts. However, it just doesn't load, etc."
"I would rate this solution a five out of ten. Not a ten because I don't have good training for this solution. I am now implementing Cisco ACI in the company. It's not 100% on the network. It's on 25% approx, more or less."
"Quite a complex solution."
"The setup is complex and should be made easier."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"I would like to see automation capabilities in the deployment process."
"A room for improvement in VMware NSX is that it has some security vulnerabilities, which means my company has to apply the patches every once in a while."
"Some configuration maximums are limiting to the user, especially when it comes to the deployment of very, very large environments."
"Traffic flow introspection topology visibility is definitely needed because at the moment, NSX-T lacks in this area."
"There is room for improvement in VMware NSX's workload management, particularly in the orchestration layer and in managing workloads across multiple clouds."
Cisco ACI is ranked 1st in Network Virtualization with 96 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 2nd in Network Virtualization with 93 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 Cisco DNA Center. 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.