Cisco ACI & Microsoft Hyper-V & L4 – L7 integration
There are options to integrate L4 – L7 devices, like firewalls or load balancers (Cisco ASA, F5, Citrix Netscaler, etc), into Cisco ACI. These integrations can be done in a managed mode, with a device package, or unmanaged mode. Both modes are available if you are using Cisco ACI with VMware vCenter integration.
When you are using Cisco ACI with Microsoft Hyper-V, you cannot integrate any L4 – L7 device yet (Q1 2016). The options to integrate these devices are not available if you select an SCVMM domain.
More to come..
My thought
Cisco ACI is a great product, which I’ve implement at some customers already. I’ve seen the product grow in the last year from something “not production ready” to an stable product which can be used in production environments. But like all new products, there are still some limitations around which can be a struggle during implementations. The VMware integration into ACI is done and complete, the Hyper-V implementation is still pretty new and some features are missing. I’m sure that the Hyper-V implementation will be more complete in the next major ACI release, but at this point in time you need to know about the limitations which are still around.
