Cisco Intersight Reviews

The first use case is to build a hybrid cloud. The first thing is to configure the server. The server could be located either on an edge location or on the data center, or it could be a remote office branch office. Cisco Intersight gives us a single pane of glass through which we can configure and monitor a server which is geographically spread, based on different locations.

Another use case involves certain workflows that we can run using Cisco Intersight. For example, it has cloud orchestration capabilities. We use it to run NetApp-related day-to-day operations. For example, we can do some volume-related, storage-related tasks directly from Cisco Intersight. It invokes a Terraform-based script through which you can just do your day-to-day operational tasks.

Another use case is that we also leverage Cisco Intersight for installing ESXi, as well as it has tight integration with Red Hat OpenShift. For the customers who are going into Kubernetes, for that we leverage Cisco Intersight, and we can directly boot those servers using the Red Hat operating system. Basically, it's a core operating system of Red Hat.

In Cisco Intersight, if you compare it from Cisco UCS Manager, it's local to a single UCS domain. But with Cisco Intersight, if you have a large data center, you can manage it and you have great visibility using Cisco Intersight. You can do a lot of automation using Cisco Intersight, and the consistent policy can be applied thoroughly to your resource group. It always gives you a cloud experience, especially when you talk about compute.

I particularly appreciate the policy feature. For example, I have two or three different stacks. For the first stack, I'm running a bare metal where I need to deploy Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And in the second stack, I need to deploy a VMware-based workload. And the third could be a Kubernetes distribution. With Cisco Intersight, you get flexibility through which you can create different policies, because everything is policy-based. And you can still have a consistent configuration and apply those policies based on your requirement. This is one of the best features because if you look into the VIC card of a Cisco server, which is a Virtual Interface Card, for each operating system, you need to have a specific configuration. There are certain templates which are already there. For example, if I need to select a VIC card of 15,000 series VIC card, there will be a predefined template for VMware, which I can select and use it for my server profile. That is one of the best benefits I can think of having Cisco Intersight.

The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed.

I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.

I have been using this for more than seven years.

In general, it's good when I compare it. From Cisco Intersight, you will not face any issue. But if you look into the hardware side, if you are not getting proper cooling, if the cooling in the data center is not that efficient, then you might see some temperature-related issue which can impact the performance, and you will get a lot of alerts. But the good thing is that Cisco Intersight will be able to capture everything in detail, and even you can configure the call home. So you will get notified if anything is going wrong. Even if one port is also down in one of your fabric interconnects, you can immediately get an email. That is a good thing.

It's very smooth. If you talk about scalability, you can create a server profile immediately, and you can map to multiple servers the moment you try to scale. Similarly, scaling down goes the same way. You can just disassociate those server profiles and remove it. Those servers are free for use again. It's quite good.

Cisco TAC in general is quite good. But sometimes, it totally depends upon the reason of that TAC case. For example, if I'm opening a case and that case is getting landed to one of the US engineers, or it's in South America or North America, I expect the quality of support will be very good. But sometimes because of the locality or the region specific, if the case gets landed into some other queue, some other region, I might feel that inefficiency from the support side. But overall, it's good. If it's very urgent, you can immediately ask the duty manager to escalate this issue. They will put a lot of attention into solving the things. Overall, I can say that the support side is good.

I am currently working with NetApp. I work on Cisco and NetApp products, both. I have used NetApp BlueXP, which is rebranded with the name NetApp Console.

For the beginner, definitely it's not that straightforward. You need to read the document properly. If there are any deployment guides, such as how to set up Cisco Intersight environment, you need to work through thoroughly. It's not straightforward if you compare it with how UCS Manager used to be. Definitely, it's a little bit complex because of multiple policies, and you need to know how you are calling the objects, because it's kind of object-oriented based. First you create a policy, then you need to call that policy in some different object. Those things are there. But once you get accustomed and practiced on Cisco Intersight, then it's easy for you. But for a starter, definitely it's a little bit complex.

It totally depends upon what you want from Cisco Intersight, because they have different categories of licenses. For example, you have Advantage license and Essential licenses. Definitely, if you want to do a lot of automation using Cisco Intersight, you need to go with the Advantage license, and that can be a little bit pricey.

I work as a partner. For optimizing, Cisco has various tools. If you talk from a network point of view, they have recently launched Nexus One. That gives enterprise an opportunity to configure a heterogeneous environment. For example, if you're having a campus networking and data center using different devices such as Catalyst, Nexus switches, you can still manage everything. And at the same time, if you still have software-defined network, which is the ACI product from Cisco, you can still manage that. With that, you will get a single pane of glass to configure and to automate the things. You don't need to log in to multiple setups to look into each device. And on top of that, they also have telemetry. That tells you how the traffic pattern is going, and based on that, you can apply configuration on your devices.

In our lab also, we have Cisco switches. You can develop a lot of automation because Cisco is rapidly working on DevNet. You have different options. You can use NSO also to configure the devices, or you can integrate with Terraform, or they also have infrastructure as code. You can leverage those playbooks if you're dealing with Ansible, and you can also do the automation on your day-to-day ops. Recently, Cisco also has some announcement with Quali. It's a stack automation. We are doing the testing with Quali. Basically, this will help for Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 deployment or Day 2 operations as well. It supports multiple stacks. And suppose, as per looking into engineering effort, suppose some team has already developed a lot of playbooks for different tasks. If suppose moving into a different tool, can say that so we are wasting a lot of engineering effort. But with the stack automation Quali, you can still use those playbooks and can do your Day 2 operation. I think that will definitely help an organization in their Day 2 operation and can help the efficiency in their operations.

With Splunk, it's very good. Splunk has a very great capability. You can do log analysis. You can have a deep visibility. And you can also have Cisco ThousandEyes. That helps you the entire network packet flow. It can even look into the application side of it and tell a network engineer that the problem is not on the network side, it's the application itself is having some issues. Visibility-wise, they have different tools, different offerings. You need to get the right tool for yourself. And Splunk is a great tool if you want to get a lot of logging, telemetry data. You can put everything into Splunk and you can get a dashboard that helps in improving your operational visibility, helps you to detect the threat as well. You can create different dashboards. And the best part is that if you're having a converged infrastructure in your data center, you can have a visibility of each stack. It's not only about having compute, network, storage. You can still look into GPU, NVIDIA side of it, or any Kubernetes that you're running, for example, Red Hat OpenShift. It's very good visibility if you're going with Splunk.

It definitely enhances the troubleshooting capabilities. And also, suppose you have built a SOC team, a Security Operations Center. If you have a proper Splunk dashboard setup, it will help the SOC team directly also because they can immediately look into if there are any abnormality happening, a sudden spike happening within the network or any application is getting compromised. The SOC team also can get heavily benefited if you have a proper Splunk setup in your environment.

Cisco Intersight definitely enhances the troubleshooting capabilities. Because as I mentioned, the first is you can directly work with TAC seamlessly. Cisco Technical Assistance Center is the TAC. In the old days, during the old time, we needed to work on an individual server, provide the logs from a single domain. It was a very cumbersome task, and it was lots of time-consuming. But with Cisco Intersight, now you can directly create the support bundle, and it can be fed directly to Cisco TAC. That helps you in getting engaged with the Cisco TAC or getting proper support from Cisco. Apart from that, doing the upgrades. Since now it's a SaaS and it's a centralized product, if you plan to upgrade your Cisco Intersight, if you plan to upgrade your UCS domain through Cisco Intersight, you can directly do it. You don't need to log in locally to each domain. That is one of the great enhancements that I can see.

I purchased Cisco ASA-V from Marketplace. My overall review rating for this product is 8.

Positive

Most of our customers use Cisco Intersight for virtual environments, primarily for VMware vSphere hypervisor and some Windows clusters. They see it as a major tool for data center management tasks and system policy management.

We have visibility into other products and storage, facilitating coexistence with Cisco and other vendors, thereby enabling us to see all the infrastructure clearly.

Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management. It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure. We have visibility to other products and storages, some networking. It is also valuable for its integration capabilities with other products.

There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment. A seamless migration tool from UCS Manager to Intersight would be beneficial.

I have been using the solution since it was released, actually since the announcement of M7, which might be a couple of months prior.

As far as I know, the solution is quite stable. There have been no glitches or problems directly related to Intersight.

There have been no scalability limitations or issues that I can mention.

I am not personally involved in dealing with customer service or support. However, I understand my colleague received satisfactory answers from them.

Positive

I am not involved in the setup process as a presale consultant; it is managed by the post-sales engineers.

The implementation is performed by a group of engineers who are familiar with the systems.

Most of our customers purchase the system for three years or more. I'm not aware if any customers use an ROI tool to assess their returns.

I haven't heard any complaints. The pricing mechanism sounds fair.

As a technical consultant, I focus on the technical aspects and needs of the customers. I always try to stay within budget and sometimes advise customers to slightly increase their budgets for better solutions. 

In all, I rate Cisco Intersight a strong nine out of ten.

I use it mostly for managing servers and updating their hardware licenses to get the hardware status in the cloud. Mostly, my customers develop Intersight on-premises because there are many restrictions from regulatory bodies for cloud sessions or going to the cloud for any data. 

It is almost always implemented as on-premises. There are many servers to look after; previously, it was for HX. If customers are currently going for HCI, we will need Nutanix and Intersight.

We no longer need to use Fabric Interconnect. We can directly use Intersight to bring up the cluster of HCI. I have seen an ROI from this solution. This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.

I do not have notes for improvement. 

I have used the solution for not more than two years.

Most of my customers don't complain, so stability seems to be okay.

I don't need to go beyond the scale I have.

For Intersight, and in general, Cisco provides better support than anyone else. However, sometimes it depends on the engineer. 

Positive

I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it.

We implement it.

I have seen an ROI from this solution. It's not just in terms of cost savings. It is also in time savings and requiring fewer people to operate this tool. Sometimes it's about indirect costs as well. The solutions are good.

There is another grid in the market. Customers are looking for other solutions more often. They are going with solutions that provide all solutions together, like Nutanix, which can implement everything without needing two solutions from two different vendors. I think it is okay in this case.

If your environment needs the capabilities required on Intersight, such as HCI implementation, I would suggest it. 

The overall product rating is eight out of ten.

We are a cloud provider serving customers with IaaS.

The features enable you to abstract the server personality away from the hardware, similar to the B-Series.

Cisco Intersight does have some integrations, though we have other automations to accomplish similar tasks, so we do not require Cisco Intersight to do everything.

The firmware management in the S-Series is not as Cisco described when we purchased it. You should be able to manage firmware without bringing the host down, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, it brings both servers in an S-Series rack down.

I do not use HyperFlex. It would be beneficial if Cisco had provided a migration path from UCS Central to Cisco Intersight.

The maintenance pricing is overly expensive.

First-level support quality can be problematic at times.

I have been using this solution for 30 years.

I have not experienced any errors. I have not had many issues with the B-Series overall. The usual RAM issues occur, but that is typical with server maintenance.

The technical support is good, and I would rate them an eight.

Positive

We are still working with Cisco.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I have experience with B-Series, C-Series, and S-Series equipment. I would recommend the S-Series but not the C-Series. I would rate this solution an eight overall.

The most common use case was the HyperFlex deployment in the past. However, with HyperFlex being discontinued, I now focus my efforts on selling Intersight with iWORK Waterlog Optimizer. This is valuable for clients with hybrid environments.

The visibility and optimization of workloads are very important features for the company.

The optimizer is valuable for selling the solution. Intersight offers a simple monitor feature, which can be integrated with other Cisco products, while still providing a solution with another brand. Additionally, it offers visibility and optimization of workloads, which are very important features for a company.

More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware. There is also a need to increase the number of partners.

I have worked with Cisco Intersight for approximately three years.

It is a good platform that is available for clients. However, it has a few bugs or issues that require technical integration to resolve. Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.

I would rate the scalability of Cisco Intersight as eight out of ten.

Technical support from Cisco has been mixed. For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX. It can be difficult to escalate issues with a basic smart net.

Neutral

The initial setup is not complex, however, certain issues with devices need to be addressed by technical support.

I am not involved in pricing topics, however, regarding licensing, it is very simple to understand for both myself and the customer, making it easy to manage.

Even if there are some issues during the first implementation, Intersight offers many features that provide great value to companies. The solution is generally valuable, even if the customer uses non-Cisco products.

We use the solution for server management across various locations.

With Intersight, it is pretty simple to manage all the environments. We don't really need to deploy any management solution.

Intersight can validate our environment. It tells us if the environment has issues and whether they are critical. It's pretty easy to connect with other tools. Intersight’s analytic features played a big part in our decision-making processes. We wanted the analytics to see how the environment is working. It was one of the reasons why we chose to buy Intersight. It requires a license.

We used the solution's automation capabilities, but it wasn’t easy. It was part of why we took some time to deploy the solution. It didn't give us much value. It wasn't that good. Intersight is a pretty complex solution. It can give you a lot of things, but nothing is simple. The usability must be better.

I have been using the solution for the last few months.

We never had any issues with the stability.

It’s a cloud solution. We never do anything in terms of scaling the environment. It is scalable. There is nothing for us to configure, manage, or maintain. Two system administrators are using the product in our organization. It is used once a week. If we don't have any alerts and don't need to change anything in the environment, we barely use it.

The technical support is not that great.

Neutral

The setup is straightforward. It is very easy to deploy the tool. It is a cloud solution. Cisco manages everything. We consume it as part of the public cloud and connect our environment. It doesn’t require maintenance. The inter-site deployment can be done within a few minutes. It was very straightforward and easy.

The solution was deployed in-house.

The product is cost-effective. We do not pay much for the tool.

We have evaluated Scale Computing and some solutions from HPE. One of the benefits of Intersight is its ability to examine the environment. We can understand whether everything's working fine and everything is connected correctly. It gives us an insight into how our solution is deployed.

The one big advantage is that it helps us know whether our solution is deployed correctly, whether we have the right drivers and devices, and whether everything is working correctly. I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We're using Cisco Intersight for performance monitoring, such as checking the hardware, plus performance management. We couldn't do performance monitoring with just the Cisco UCS Manager.

What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability.

An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities.

Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release.

I've been using Cisco Intersight for more than two years.

Based on experience, Cisco Intersight is a stable solution.

Cisco Intersight is a scalable tool that you can scale up and down according to your needs.

The technical support for Cisco Intersight is knowledgeable and responsive, so my rating for the support team is four out of five.

We're using Cisco UCS Manager at the same time we're using Cisco Intersight. Still, with Cisco UCS Manager, we can't monitor the performance of the hardware, so we're using Cisco Intersight for that purpose.

Setting up Cisco Intersight was easy, so the initial setup is a four out of five for me.

Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four.

We evaluated the Cisco UCS Manager.

Cisco itself maintains Cisco Intersight at the ground level. You need one to two people to make some checks, but Cisco handles maintenance. Twenty people use Cisco Intersight within the company.

My rating for Cisco Intersight is seven out of ten.

My company is a Cisco Intersight partner.

While it is a very complex solution. We have managed to deploy it for ten data centers across our environment.

It's doing pretty well. We're managing our EdgeX nodes and doing all the upgrades.

It has helped us in many ways. Since our team is only six members and we have ten data centers across the site, it's difficult for us to manage the patching for EdgeX plus the firmware upgrades. Both are very heavy and very critical. Using Intersight with this small team makes our job easy. That's the biggest benefit - the ease of management.

I have had a very good experience. 

It has many great features. 

We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one.

The solution can scale. 

It's a very complex solution.

Sometimes it's lacking upgrades in the UCS, and I have to deal with the firmware from the UCS manager. 

We're now looking towards expansion and adding vCenters in Intersight. We are currently exploring the new features with our partner. Since we have the on-prem version, its features are fewer than the cloud. It would be nice to have more features for the on-prem option. 

There is room for enhancement in a feature called Robo. 

I've been using the solution for almost four years. 

The major challenge for us and for Cisco Intersight is the upgrade process. Sometimes when we ask for the upgrade, we had to have a discussion internally with the team and with our Cisco tech engineer regarding the latest version. The current version for us was 4.52B and we were exploring the idea of moving to 2C, and they recommended going first to 2E. When we asked why they told us that version was very stable and came highly recommended. 

I know there is a difference between the long-term upgrade and the feature upgrade. Sometimes you need the new batches to eliminate any vulnerabilities or fix any bugs.

It's easily scalable. 

Only the system administrators are using the solution. That's six people. 

I'm not sure if there are plans to increase usage right now. 

Regarding support, our tech engineer is always available 24/7. We had one major issue at the beginning of the new year last year. and the tech engineer was with us right away at the time. The issue started at 10:00 PM in Egyptian local time, which means GMT plus two. We were stuck on the issue for almost six or seven hours. He stuck with us and was very professional and handled the job very professionally.

Technical support is always there whenever we need them.

Positive

I have not used a different solution. 

I wasn't there attending to the implementation for Intersight. That said, I managed to deploy the EdgeX nodes and the clusters for the standard and the edge clusters for the standard edge. I have been there to witness how to deploy the extended nodes as well. It's very complex, and it requires lots of technical skills. That said, the process was very enjoyable for me, exploring new tech from Cisco.

You only need two people to deploy the solution - one member of the IT team and one administrator. Typically you want to ensure the person with the most experience is handling the implementation. 

While I'm sure there is an ROI based on the benefits I've seen, I don't have any hard statistics. 

The hyper-converged technology is one of the major technologies right now, especially in consolidating the network and the storage tiers. It relieves us from a lot of pain and a lot of workload regarding the storage tier and network tier, and also the environment for it.

I do not handle the licensing aspect of the solution. 

I have heard of Nutanix and VxRail as other options. We looked into these and after some long discussions chose to instead go with Cisco. We do use a lot of Cisco in our infrastructure. 

We're currently using the EdgeX nodes M5, and the next generation is M6. I really recommend using these servers. It's really solid and actually has very long-term stability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.