Cisco ANM

[jteixido]

Team,

We are thinking of purchasing the Cisco ANM product in an effort to centrally manage our ACE modules with a GUI interface. My past experiences with GUI and Cisco have not being positive, but I don't hold grudges.

Could you guys please respond with your unbiased opinion of this product whether you are currently using it or knows a colleague that is using it.

Thank you,

John...

[litrenta]

for monitoring , config , and role based access control, as well as larm notification its pretty good. The main feature folks want that isn't there yet is reports and graphing of traffic.

If you have a server that meets the requirements layed out at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/docs/app_ntwk_services/data_center_app_services/application_networking_manager/2.1/installation/guide/IG_prep.html#wp1060727

you can get a demo license that will allow you to have 2 ace blades with 5 contexts

demo license available at www.cisco.com/go/license click on the link under licenses not requiring a PAK

You can then test drive.

[dkirsch]

John,

I see you did not get much of a response there. If you have moved forwar, what has your impression been so far?

Cheers,

David K.

[jteixido]

My impression is what I suspected that not many people are using this product. I fear that this product will be like other GUI products where you need to do somethings on GUI and other things on CLI.

Most of the times, people abandon the GUI and go straight to CLI, when translates to thousands of dollars wasted.

[dkirsch]

Ok...well, there are many hundreds of licensed customers, though apparently not many on this forum.

As to the fear you need to "drop to CLI", you may not feel that way after using the product given it's scope in provisioning.

I'll leave that to others to comment though if they wish.

Cheers,

David K.

[jteixido]

Yea, I'm little at it as something positive. Our Cisco channel has been very helpful in answering our questions. I'm looking forward to the implementation and will post my experiences.

John...

[zac.quinn]

We have purchased ANM for our installation and I have to say that we've not really started using it. It is a very powerful tool as David suggests but I found it much easier to get the ACE up and running using CLI before importing into ANM. Now this may because it's the first time I've used ACE and have only done the ACE course when doesn't use or even mention ANM.

Once imported though it is easy task to add more servers into a farm or tweak the policies.

If I get time to start using this in anger (in the middle of troubleshooting oracle app timeout problem - see my post) I'll update this thread.

Cheers,

Zac