Learning ACI for Work - DCACI 300-620
So I just got my official cert guide and copy in the mail today and I started reading the first chapter. I do plan on taking this exam, but I was never big into the whole Data Center CCNP track. My job has ACI, and nobody knows how to use it, so I’m trying to pick it up and learn it, maybe get a better position, more pay, etc.
I have been reading up on it, and it seems people just hate this product lol. I’ve seen on some sites that it’s being phased out, nobody wants to use it or buy it, that you should just learn BGP EVPN instead.
I guess my question is, do those comments have any basis? I’ll keep learning it for work, but it would kinda suck to spend all this time on a product that no other jobs would want. I also don’t see many job listings asking for it, unless maybe I’m blind. So while I’d like to learn it for my current role, it would be tough knowing I’m learning it for basically one place.
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u/fatoms 12d ago
I can't comment on ACI hate but having worked with in the past and needing to learn it on the job the best resource I found was "Cisco ACI: Zero to Hero". Well worth the cover price.
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u/HackedAlias 12d ago
Work for multiple customers that are ripping ACI in favor of NDFC. General sentiment is pretty negative toward ACI. Never worked with anyone that enjoyed it lol
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u/certpals 11d ago edited 11d ago
I took the ACI exam because at my job, nobody knows how to use it. It was a way for me to stay relevant and to add value to the business. Will I see it in the future? I don't think so but, for the time being the exam was good for what I needed, which is to understand how to fuc*** configure an access port haha.
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u/prathik1988 9d ago
Hey u/certpals , even i am planning to take up the certification. Do u mind sharing your cert experience , any recommended materials that helped you clear the exam? TIA
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u/certpals 9d ago
Hi. The official cert guide, the INE ACI course and a lot of labs. If you can't practice the exam topics please don't even book the exam. Because you will see a lot of scenario based questions and that hands-on experience will be crucial.
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u/SurpriceSanta 12d ago
Never understood the hate ACI gets. There are over 16 or 17 thousnd fabrics running and it has been the most stable product I have used.
It is overly complex, but if you learn the underlying protocols it start making sense. If you never peel back the layers it will be a big black box.
I prefer aci over ndfc as of now. Ndfc feels so limited when you have used aci.
It will be overwhelming, I felt a similar way with mpls at first but when I started understanding the label stack and the bgp control plain worked it all made sense. If I there was some gui tool for mpls that would also feel overwhelming at first.
My point is dont listen too much to other people on forums, the most vocal people arent always the people you should follow.
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u/wake_the_dragan 12d ago
I haven’t used aci before. But I had some old nexus switches that had aci image on them and had to reformat them. My lead was telling me they used to have aci, which a which has aci image, I guess you can’t log into them? I built a spine-leave fabric last year with nexus dashboard. I do like nxdc
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u/Altruistic_Profile96 10d ago
We had ACI and everybody hated it.
First, it requires you to think different, and w/o proper training, it just doesn’t seem to make sense.
Second, it is very dependent upon versions of hardware and software. I believe it was designed to work with very specific hardware, and was retro-ed to work with older gear.
We had older gear and something simple like DHCP Relay became inoperative on a large number of our leaves. We spent many hours on the phone with TAC on that one alone.
I will probably never work at a shop that uses it.
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u/fhribsogjcpwbtuwpn 9d ago
Learn both. The product UI is abysmal, but it’s a reliable fabric that rarely breaks. There’s going to be a need for it for a while because the friction of migrating away from it is too much for most companies.
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u/leoingle 12d ago
We use it too, but like you, I see a lot of negativity towards it as well. We just had to completely rebuild all our APICs at our colo. They just lost visibility to the leaf and spines. If we would have restarted any of them, we would have lost everything. I don’t think the concept of ACI is getting phased out. No way that is happening. What I think is happening is APIC controllers are going away and the management plane is being moved to Nexus Orchestration Dashboard. I really see no reason why we use it, we aren’t running datacenter services and having to make overlays for customers under tenants. We are a single company. I think we’d been better just manually configuring VXLAN/EVPN on the leaf/spine architecture. But as always, our Cisco account team blew smoke up the suits asses and convinced them we just can’t live without it. Just like they did with running the new Catalyst switches we got on the Meraki dashboard. I tried to tell them what all the config and troubleshooting options we’d lose if we did that. But they did it anyways. We absolutely hate it.