Cisco Nexus Dashboard

I have been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

Optimization is key, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard is more of a data center orchestrator. They bring this whole leaf and spine architecture across the sites. The biggest complex part of a data center is having a layer 2 and layer 3 part of your network extended beyond its own site. That is done very cleanly and easily using Cisco Nexus Dashboard through something called Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator or Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller. Both do the same thing.

It is definitely value for money because now, with big data centers and your data center spanning across multiple places, you do not have to go at every point and start setting up one device at a time. With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, it is a plug-and-play technology. You can set up your network and bring it up to production in nearly no time. You get your return on value as soon as you can.

The biggest benefits are the scalability, the granularity, and the modularity. The design it prefers and the out-of-the-box capabilities and features that it provides are all really good advantages of Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

In terms of features, the orchestration is valuable. The one feature that I really appreciate the most is the day-to-day operations, which is a very smart fault analysis and fault troubleshooting feature called Nexus Insights. That is a very good feature which only VMware has something of that quality. Nexus Insights, which sits along with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, is really good.

End-to-end visibility across the devices and across the sites is really good.

The deployment model is mostly hybrid, but I would say more on-premise and less hybrid.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is very scalable. Even if you have to scale in or scale out one device or one site or 100 devices and 100 sites, it is just a matter of plug-and-play. When we were turning on 100 devices, they were all happening in parallel. That is exactly how it happens with the sites. If you want to add a site, just make sure they are physically connected to a cable which can pass on the message to Cisco Nexus Dashboard. Cisco Nexus Dashboard can take care of everything from there.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is very advanced and very smart, and it has a Cisco brand name to it. I have seen HPE's, Arista, and Juniper orchestrators, and all these vendors have their own. I would not say that they are not smart enough, but they are not as smart as Cisco because Cisco has solved the biggest challenge of the multi-site data center better than anyone else. Over the past 10 years, Cisco has been a pioneer in leading all these advanced design solutions. Everyone is doing it now, but Cisco started it. Everyone copies it at this point and does the same thing, but Cisco is still doing it better because Cisco has been doing this for at least a decade, maybe more than that. Cisco is definitely way ahead. Sometimes people say Cisco ACI or Cisco Nexus Dashboard is hard and complex, but I feel Cisco is way more advanced and way ahead of its market. It has given a NASA-level of technology to normal enterprise corporate networks. It is way advanced.

Cisco is definitely smarter than me, so I cannot think of any improvement because they are already bringing in some smart Hypershield switches. Although that is not a new concept, Cisco is just getting motivation from other vendors who have already done it. The biggest selling point for Cisco is Cisco's brand name and the power of Cisco Nexus Dashboard switches. In terms of innovation, they have already brought in switches like Hypershield and the Hyper-smart switches which have built-in firewalls in them. I think they are already way ahead of time.

I have been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

There was a time when Cisco had buggy software because when Cisco ACI, actually Cisco Nexus Dashboard, used to be called the DCNM back then, these were all new software. Every new software has a bug, which is fine. But over the years, in the last 10 years at least, and now where we stand, I have never seen a random crash or a random bug happening in their software. Ninety percent of the time, it is human error which is causing a problem. Cisco is automating so many things out-of-the-box that they are not leaving things to human error. They are resolving and doing most of the things fully automated. There is less margin of error by humans. In terms of bugs and stability, once Cisco Nexus Dashboard works, I can guarantee it will always work. If it is not working, you have done something wrong.

Some regions in Cisco TAC, like the Sydney region, is really good. The US region is really good, the San Jose one and the other ones. The Indian region, also the Bangalore one, is pretty good, but a few regions in India and some other Asian zones need some better training so they can troubleshoot the issues faster. They take way too long.

VMware, which is now Broadcom, stopped supporting VMM integration with Cisco ACI and Cisco Nexus Dashboard just for the reason that Cisco was able to manage VMware's world to a large extent and people were really loving it. They stopped supporting it with no good reasons just to make customers' lives harder and Cisco's life harder.

In terms of zero-touch provisioning or plug-and-play feature, let us say you have 100 switches and you want to set them all up. To bootstrap those switches, you would need at least 40 minutes per device. That is very aggressive, and it is always more than that. Imagine 40 minutes times 100. You can see how many days you are counting. With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, you simply plug in the cables. The bootstrap, if you really want to count the bootstrap time, is reduced to 15-20 minutes. If you count the time that you are spending, that is nearly one minute. Imagine 40 minutes down to one minute. What was 4,000 minutes is now down to 100 minutes. Not even 100 minutes, because now all the switches are getting bootstrapped in parallel. So it is 4,000 minutes down to one minute. That is amazing.

I have been working with Cisco Nexus Dashboard for 15 years in different roles. Sometimes I was directly at Cisco, some years I was in Cisco TAC in the support team, and I have been working with multiple partners for professional services, managed service providers, and resellers. So I have been in many companies.

The professional services and license is expensive everywhere.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard has its learning curve, but once you do it at least once or twice, it is very straightforward. End-to-end visibility across the devices and across the sites is really good. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

Our main use case for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is to ensure that all devices have the correct code and to identify any configuration changes between the leaves. If they are not in sync, we try to have that notify us so that we can go and rectify it.

What I like the most about Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the easier way to know exactly which device is connected to where. It paints a pretty picture, and if there is a link that is down, it color codes it to indicate that you need to pay attention there, among other things. Those are my favorites.

I think Cisco Nexus Dashboard can be improved by making it easier to onboard devices because it is a little hard to onboard devices in my opinion, at least from what I remember. At least that was the case with the previous deployment where we were not using VXLAN technology. The newer version we are about to deploy again for this spine-leaf setup, and I hope it is easier to onboard.

I have been in my current field for a little over 15 years.

The first time when we got Cisco deployed, for some reason, it was not as scalable as how we wanted because the leaves stopped growing after approximately 150 or something. We needed to be scaled much larger, and that is when we pivoted from Cisco to Arista. However, I think it is coming back as they eliminated that problem.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate technical support at a ten because if you do not know something, the TAC guys are going to walk you from end-to-end.

Prior to adopting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, we were using Cisco devices as one of our main switches that we work with.

I would describe my experience with deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard as not that bad.

We do not use any of the providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for three to four years initially, and then got switched to Arista, and now it is coming back again as we just deployed the servers for those who are in the process of setting it up.I do not think Cisco optimizes the experience of a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup because we have Arista in our network too.I do not know how end-to-end visibility from Cisco affects my organization's troubleshooting capabilities.The first time when we got Cisco deployed, for some reason, it was not as scalable as how we wanted because the leaves stopped growing after approximately 150 or something. We needed to be scaled much larger, and that is when we pivoted from Cisco to Arista. However, I think it is coming back as they eliminated that problem.I would rate this review at a nine out of ten.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard serves as a dashboard to ensure that all Nexus devices are properly set up.

The feature I appreciate most about Cisco Nexus Dashboard is the ability to control everything in one centralized place.

This centralized place feature benefits my organization because most of our devices are Cisco, so I can see if something is going on with the device, if something is going wrong with the port, and other issues. It is literally a centralized place where I can see everything.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard is pretty solid, so I do not know what can be improved or what additional features should be included.

I have been using Cisco Nexus Dashboard for almost two years.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that it is excellent because you can see from one side to the other side.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard scales with the growing needs of my organization. We are a large organization, but not enormous. I will assess scalability further as my organization continues to grow, but for now, it works well.

I evaluate customer service and tech support for Cisco Nexus Dashboard as good, but sometimes it is challenging, and I have to escalate the case.

When I write a ticket for support, they respond immediately. I have no issues with that. It is just when they need to fix the problem that some people have to escalate because they do not have the knowledge or understanding of what is going on.

Prior to adopting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, I was using a solution called Splunk to address similar needs.

I considered the change to Cisco Nexus Dashboard because at the time I got Splunk, it was more command line oriented, with people doing coding and other technical tasks. Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides GUI visibility, so you can see what is actually going on through an interface rather than through commands.

My experience with deploying Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that everything went well because once you connect with the engineers, they will help you get everything connected. It is not difficult to do.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cisco Nexus Dashboard is that it is expensive. They are not going to lower the price. If you want it, you are going to have to pay for it. It is good though. Once you have it, it is very good. Cisco Nexus Dashboard is expensive, as are most other Cisco products.

I did not consider any other solutions before selecting Cisco Nexus Dashboard because I always have Cisco equipment, so I am not going to any other provider.

I do not have any specific challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks that Cisco addresses, because everything is set up so well that I do not have any problems.

The end-to-end visibility affects my organization's troubleshooting capabilities in that I do not use it as the main software. I have other software that I use to troubleshoot issues, but it is one of the tools that I can use. Most of the troubleshooting I do is through another software called Splunk, which is also owned by Cisco, and I prefer the coding part because I can track things better than just looking at Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

I rate this review as a 10.

Cisco Nexus is used in data centers with a simple Nexus OS deployment model. In our environment, we do not use programmability with Cisco Nexus. The switches are used very basically in our infrastructure.

Cisco Nexus is typically used for data centers and layer two connectivity. We do not use ACI, layer three, or any programmability, simply switching. I am currently migrating from the Nexus EX series to the Nexus FX3 series switches. I encountered an issue where different models within the same series, the 95308 DC, do not support VPC between the EX series and FX3 series. Although I asked our account manager to provide a solution for a smooth transition from the EX to FX3 series, we currently have significant work ahead of us. We need to obtain downtime from management because we have VPCs enabled with two switches per cabinet, and we need to replace these two switches with the FX3 series because the EX series is now end-of-life. I am installing them in parallel to minimize downtime. If Cisco could support VPC between the two different models of the same series, the transition would be very smooth.

The biggest problems during migration were corporate issues, including dependencies on other devices such as F5, HSMs, and firewalls from Palo Alto. Everything was connected over the core switches, which made this a quite difficult part to manage and to onboard the teams and to understand the impact of the migration.

We encountered an issue where we have two data centers, and unknowingly we were configuring the devices with the same VPC number on both devices. By doing that, we were not able to terminate the lease lines over those core switches. According to Cisco, we had to change the VPC number of one of the data center's core switches since they are in a VPC. We are still waiting, and it has been more than five to six years just to change the VPC number and migrate back the lease line. Now we are having cabin switches for the lease line and then the core switch. That VPC number issue was quite surprising for us.

However, we have a very frequent issue with Cisco Nexus, particularly with the SFPs. Every time a port or the SFP heats up, it gets faulty. We have almost sixteen Nexus switches per data center. In a year, we experience one or two port issues per annum. We have standard Equinix data centers with standard installations, but somehow the temperature is always maintained and there is no ducting, yet the ports and the SFPs heat up or become faulty. This is a very frequent issue with the SFP-based port.

I have been using Cisco Nexus for about nine years.

Cisco support is helpful. I would rate the support of Cisco an eight out of ten.

We transitioned from the Catalyst 2960 and the Catalyst 6500 series switches to Cisco Nexus switches, which follow our traditional spanning tree and core distribution and access layer models. We kept the same hierarchical models and did not introduce ACI or any other spine-leaf configurations, so VXLAN is not used in our model.

The deployment of Cisco Nexus was very straightforward.

I was part of the team that deployed Cisco Nexus. We have a collective team to deploy Cisco Nexus because we were actually migrating from the Catalyst 6509 to the Nexus 9508, which was our core switch. Although the Nexus configuration was quite easy, the whole migration process was quite difficult and involved almost onboarding all the company.

I participated in the deployment of our core switch 9508 model, Cisco Nexus 9508.

Dependending on the experience and the expertise, I believe a single person can deploy Cisco Nexus.

The migration took about two or three months.

I do not use Cisco Nexus to support multi-tenant environments.

Regarding micro-segmentation, segmentation of the tasks on Cisco Nexus is quite useful.

We do not use the VXLAN feature with Cisco Nexus because VXLAN is used for ACI, and we are not using ACI.

I manage the licensing for Cisco Nexus, but the pricing is handled by a third team, the procurement team. Therefore, I have no idea about how much the cost of all the renewals and the new devices is.

I would rate this product a nine out of ten overall.