Cisco Compute Hyperconverged Reviews

My main use case for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is for HyperFlex, where I develop and troubleshoot software for Cisco Catalyst Layer 3 switches, including the Linux-based control data plane component. I also work with Linux kernel device drivers, boot loaders, and system bring-up.

In my day-to-day work, I use Cisco Compute Hyperconverged to combine compute, storage, networking, and virtualization into an integrated platform, managing and troubleshooting VM and virtual infrastructure. I troubleshoot Linux systems and networking, monitoring CPU, memory, storage, and network performance.

I also use Cisco Compute Hyperconverged as an infrastructure platform, compute server, for cloud-based management and monitoring, and for data center networking and policy management.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged benefits our organization by simplifying infrastructure, combining compute, storage, and networking on one platform. It has easy, centralized management through Cisco Intersight, better scalability where resources can be expanded as business needs grow, and high availability, which helps keep applications and VMs running during hardware and component failure. It also offers flexible virtualization to support virtualized workloads in a consolidated infrastructure environment.

Since using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, I have noticed improved performance, which optimizes how compute, storage, and networking work together. The costing is very good, and we are saving a lot of time compared to different platforms.

The best features that Cisco Compute Hyperconverged offers include combining infrastructure into an integrated platform, virtualization support, virtualized workload, and centralized VM management. It leverages Cisco UCS compute and networking capability distributed. The HyperFlex data platform has a distributed storage design for scalable virtual workloads and centralized cloud-based management, monitoring, and automation.

The most useful features for me are automation and monitoring, which simplify deployment, health monitoring, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Network integration is also valuable, where I integrate with Cisco networking and data center technology. Features such as data efficiency, including compression and deduplication, help optimize storage.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged's governance and security are strong and easy to manage, providing centralized visibility, policy enforcement, and workload management for AI workloads running across the infrastructure. Security helps protect AI workload data applications and network traffic through integrated security control and access policy. Monitoring and compliance are very good, as it identifies anomalous activity, policy violations, and infrastructure risks.

Improvements for HyperFlex could include making it more reliable or easier to use, as sometimes new, less experienced people struggle to use it. When explaining keys and features, they do not easily understand. The performance also needs a slight increase by integrating compute, storage, or networking into a single optimized system. The product needs to improve scalability and reliability, with the most important aim being to reduce complexity.

While the costing is good, reducing the infrastructure cost would be better.

Regarding the accuracy of Cisco Compute Hyperconverged's AI capabilities, I would not say it is 100%, but it is good, with results of almost 85%. It needs some improvement, but at least 90 to 92% would be more helpful for us.

I have been using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for the last three years.

In my experience, Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is stable and provides a very good experience.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged allows for infrastructure resources to grow as workload requirements increase, and the product is improving in scalability.

Customer support is good, they are helpful and always on time. As of now, I have not reached out to customer support because I did not need to. The feature is good, with not too much complexity, but I believe some colleagues have reached out when they found an issue, and I have heard customer support is good.

Before using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, I used Nutanix AHV, the Nutanix cloud platform, VMware, and HPE SimpliVity from HP in one organization.

While I have not saved much money with Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, I believe time is money, so we have saved time.

Regarding pricing, the pricing is a little bit high, which I feel. The setup cost is good and generally similar to other platforms. The features they provide are good, extra reliable, and scalable, so the overall value is good.

I have evaluated other options before choosing Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, such as Nutanix AHV, the Nutanix cloud platform, and VMware vSAN. Both are also good.

My advice for others looking into using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is that there is not any complexity, so if they understand the basic things, they will easily be able to use and work on it. The complexity is not too high; it is short and simple. I would rate Cisco Compute Hyperconverged a nine out of ten.

I have only used Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for telecom equipment, specifically telecom network functions. I cannot comment on other applications, but when using the hyperscaler for telecom, particularly for Packet Core, it was a user plane function. In these user plane functions, we see degradation in performance. However, the control plane function, specifically EPC and Mobile Mobility Management functions, handles the tasks well with no concerns, although there are capacity issues in the user plane.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged has many valuable features in the open market. We selected Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for their specific product, which was the EPC. When we use the EPC product for Packet Core's high throughput, that is what we have utilized. Better products are available in the market compared to Cisco when considering features.

I have utilized the platform's security features, as those built-in security features are there. We used them, but we also tried to use external firewalls. Unfortunately, we faced some concerns, so we relied on their internal features. Regarding Cisco Compute Hyperconverged's data protection capabilities in terms of business continuity and protection, I would rate them as a nine, as there are no concerns concerning protection.

I see that the hardware side and performance concerns are prevalent, even in Cisco hardware used in the card platform. We have observed the same issues with Cisco Compute Hyperconverged platforms as well, indicating a performance issue.

Regarding the stability rating, it should be around seven because the support from Cisco is nice, but the performance of the product does not meet our preferences.

For additional features to enhance competitiveness, Cisco needs to improve their hardware utilization performance specifically. There is a significant gap between the throughput they recommend and what commercial enterprises experience, which is around a thirty percent gap.

If we talk about Red Hat or other external platforms, in that scenario, it is better for enterprises that want a complete support package to go with Cisco. However, if the enterprise has the capability to maintain in-house, it may be better to consider different hyperscalers. Another concern with Cisco is that they are trying to bind customers to specific hardware.

I have been dealing with Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for around eight years, as we have used this hyperconverged solution for Cisco Packet Core. In Packet Core, we were using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged.

I have worked with Cisco Meraki vMX, but it is not being used by most enterprises because this product is required by higher-end enterprises where more than two thousand devices are needed.

I would rate the Cisco technical support team around nine.

Positive

Their pricing is acceptable because they are trying to match the market.

I have experience with Fortinet FortiGate and Cisco. I did work with FortiGate and Cisco.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged products I am dealing with mostly are DNA and SD-WAN, specifically Viptela. I did work with Viptela.

I have been dealing with Cisco as well as FortiGate.

Regarding Cisco, I did work for SD-WAN as well as SDN, specifically Cisco ACI.

I have been working with Cisco Compute Hyperconverged.

We never used virtual desktop infrastructure, so I cannot comment on that.

My overall review rating for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is seven.

Our major, primary use case is a virtualization environment. The main purpose is virtualization and better performance and scalability, which are the reasons we selected Cisco Compute Hyperconverged. The enterprise applications that perform well on Cisco Compute Hyperconverged are mostly Microsoft NAV and other file servers.

As a customer, the biggest advantage for me in the tool is the costing, and the second thing is the support. The specific features that stand out to me are almost the same. We are also using a VMware environment, specifically Dell VXRail, so there is not much difference between HyperFlex and Cisco Compute Hyperconverged; unified management helps to improve our operations.

Regarding security, Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is adequate, but we are not dependent only on Cisco Compute Hyperconverged security because we are using other security tools as well. The data protection capabilities ensure business continuity.

Although there are many advantages to the tool, an area for improvement in Cisco Compute Hyperconverged would be that the user interface could be more user-friendly; if you have basic knowledge, you can operate it.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is good already, but something that still has potential to improve would be the performance. Performance-wise it is good, but the negative aspect is the troubleshooting, as it takes too much time to resolve issues.

We have been using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged since 2015-16. We have been working with Cisco since 2015, and we started our career in hyperconverged infrastructure around 2008 or 2009.

When comparing these tools, the only difference I see is that Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is more stable than HyperFlex, and HyperFlex is more stable than others; but sometimes there are some issues in the synchronization in Cisco Compute Hyperconverged because it takes more time to resolve as compared to other virtualizations. Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is a 99% stable and reliable solution, but if any issues occur, then it takes too much time to resolve them.

Regarding scalability in Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, it is easy to scale, and scalability is adequate.

Regarding technical support from Cisco, I think technical support is adequate, and based on Cisco support, we have purchased Cisco Compute Hyperconverged. If I had to rate support from zero to 10 points, I would give them a seven.

They could improve by three points. First is the resolution time, as they should improve it, and transfers should be immediate if the problem is not resolved at the first level; sometimes they take too much time to transfer the call to the next level.

Installation is adequate; it is not very difficult.

We see value for money in this solution. If the system is working without any issues for five years and we are getting better performance, then we achieve ROI. Purchasing physical servers or other servers incurs multiple solutions, but there are some dependencies, and thus we have achieved ROI.

The cost for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is quite reasonable; the solution is reasonably priced.

We work with Cisco as a customer. We have some servers installed on AWS, specifically firewalls, but not Cisco. To evaluate the performance, we check the CPUs, memory utilization, and network performance with load and without load; these are the parameters we check. Summarizing everything we have discussed, I would give Cisco Compute Hyperconverged a rating of seven.

My main use case for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is for the hosting of our data center.

A quick specific example of how I use Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for hosting the Nova data center is for holding VMs for a number of government agencies and also the management of the network.

In my experience, the best features that Cisco Compute Hyperconverged offers include its modularity, so besides just having a regular two U, one U servers, we also have a blade chassis.

The modularity specifically benefits my team or operations because in the case we had a blade chassis failure, we installed even more one U and two U servers to hold the load for the nodes.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged has positively impacted my organization by providing automatic failover and diversity of the failover which has helped us greatly in disaster recovery.

A specific situation where the automatic failover helped us during a disaster recovery scenario happened when the blade chassis failed, so the VMs that were currently hosted on the blade chassis were moved to the other compute nodes in the cluster.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged can be improved by addressing the learning curve and being open to more open-source software, such as Proxmox, specifically allowing use with Proxmox or even just basic Debian, rather than relying on VMware.

There seems to be a lot of aftermarket hardware on sale on eBay or other platforms, making it possible for persons preparing for their CCMP Data Center to buy this equipment, but hosting it on VMware may be a bit pricey, especially now with the whole Broadcom situation, so it should probably be able to open it and allow installation of Proxmox.

I have been using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged since 2019.

Initially, Cisco Compute Hyperconverged was not stable, but we have gotten it to that stage; I previously mentioned the blade chassis and a number of blades failing, as well as some cards being dead on arrival when the equipment initially came.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged's scalability is very good; we have a number of different nodes in our cluster, and due to its modularity, that has saved us a number of times.

The customer support was a bit rocky, mostly due to the language barrier, as it seems we are supported by a lot of Latin Americans who speak Spanish and not really English, which is something that needs improvement; specifically, I work in the Caribbean, and I believe Cisco should get support for the Caribbean from people in the Caribbean.

We originally used HP, but during a significant Cisco deployment, everything kind of came from Cisco, which was probably the best bet we made.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been pretty good; we received a hefty discount for having a number of CCIEs and CCMPs on staff, and it has been a good experience with no complaints.

Before choosing Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, we evaluated other options; as I stated, we had an HP and Dell offering prior to going all Cisco, but later on, we switched to Cisco.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is to always scale it to as much as possible but leave room to grow; having such a good product leads you to wanting more, and if you have the room to grow, you will grow into it. I would rate this product an 8 overall.

My main use case for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is for enterprise virtualization migrations, hybrid multi-cloud consolidation, and high-performance edge computing deployments.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix is the primary solution for enterprise virtualization migrations, hybrid multi-cloud consolidation, and high-performance edge computing deployments. I am using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix for virtualization migrations and multi-cloud purposes.

When we started using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, we observed a striking reduction in operational complexity and rapid virtualization cost optimizations, along with dramatic hardware and environmental consolidation, which are the main features we have observed since we started using it.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged offers unified cloud management through Cisco Intersight plus Nutanix Prism, which acts as a cloud-based operating platform that handles physical layers and firmware updates, hardware telemetry, while Prism orchestrates virtual machines and eliminates the need for localized management appliances.

When evaluating the AI capabilities for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix, it helps prevent data privacy and sovereignty in AI governance, zero-trust security such as infrastructure-rooted zero-trust security, and automated lifecycle governance.

The accuracy and reliability of Cisco AI capabilities are both good, and I am satisfied with the accuracy and reliability of its output.

While Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix is highly regarded for its performance and cloud-like simplicity for real-world deployment, one area for improvement could be high entry and renewal pricing.

Support is good, but Cisco can improve the complex troubleshooting environments because making troubleshooting easier can lead to happier users and allow the IT team to work more efficiently.

I have been using Cisco Compute Hyperconverged for two years.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is ninety percent stable.

Scalability for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is good.

Customer support from Cisco is good.

I am a partner of Cisco technology, so we use Cisco first.

Fewer employees are needed with Cisco Compute Hyperconverged, which is why we save money.

The pricing and setup cost are good, but when it comes to renewal, the pricing is costly.

I did not evaluate other options.

I would give Cisco Compute Hyperconverged an eight out of ten. I deduct two points for the pricing, renewal, and some troubleshooting complexity. I can advise that when a new organization starts, they can use Cisco Compute Hyperconverged to lower the number of IT engineers needed. My overall rating for Cisco Compute Hyperconverged is eight out of ten.