Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

Our primary use of the Cisco HyperFlex HX solution is to run virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX is that it is self-contained. 

Cisco HyperFlex HX is fairly stable. We don't have any problems with it. I would give stability an eight out of ten.

For the scalability of the solution, I would give it an 8 out of10.

The solution's technical support is good. We have had a lot of experiences with them in the past. It's fine. We just had some questions. We didn't know how to do everything. 

We've had a few problems. It's new. Often, we don't know how to solve the issue we're having. The response times are okay.

We were looking for hyperconverged solutions. We already purchased Cisco products for our data center. This was a next-generation device.

The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve.

We used a reseller, SMP, for the deployment.

The other vendors on our shortlist were VMware and Datrium.

On a scale from one to ten, I would grade Cisco HyperFlex HX an eight. If the cost was improved, I would give it a ten.

Make sure to look at a long list of competitors in the hyperconverged sector for cross-reference before purchasing. Look at all the main players.

Our primary use case for Cisco HyperFlex HX is internal. We use it for internal hyper-converged. I post VMs for internal use and for customers.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the time to deliver a VM takes me five minutes. In comparison, my cloud team's response is a couple of days based on all their overhead policies, procedures, and ticket requests. This is substantial.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is easy to use all across the board. I can do hyper-converged without being a storage guy. That's a big deal.

They should fix the upgrade process. The upgrade process is great. It is seamless 70% of the time, but when it doesn't work, it goes south. Cisco needs to fix some of those upgrade bugs and it will be a perfect solution. That would be good for somebody who doesn't want to spend a lot of time micromanaging the device in production.

It is very stable. I've been running one cluster since 2016 with no outages. I've got two other clusters that have been running flawlessly.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has got great scalability. Right now, they offer a potential scale that is well beyond my network requirements.

Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex.

We weren't using any previous solution. I was trying to redesign how we deployed services and tools to our customers. The only way to do that was with virtualization.  

I needed something like Cisco HyperFlex HX because I'm a network guy. I'm not a server or storage guy. I wasn't the VM guy. I needed something that I could support with very low maintenance and very few hands. Cisco HyperFlex HX has fulfilled that need greatly.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

For the deployment, we consulted with Cisco directly.

HyperFlex and Nutanix were the main two products that I looked at. The reason I eventually chose Cisco was cost and data center footprint. Nutanix was twice the physical footprint in the data center than HyperFlex.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product a solid nine because of the upgrade process. Everything we've been doing with it is blazing a new trail. 

We've been dramatically changing how we deliver the service. Not only am I changing how we deliver the service, but the tools team is changing the platform they're delivering it on too. It's all a new investment. There are not a lot of cost savings today that we can realize.

You can deploy Cisco HyperFlex HX with very little knowledge of UCS, hyper-converged, or storage. There is very little ramp-up time. UCS manager takes a little bit of getting used to. Cisco HyperFlex HX is a solid product. I can't steer people away from it.

Our primary use case of Cisco HyperFlex HX is for data centers. It performs well. The solution helps us simplify operations through minimal maintenance and ease of patching. 

We did the upgrade as part of the lifecycle when the previous equipment became end-of-life. It was time for the investment. At the same time, we were building out new data centers. 

This product has improved the way our organization functions by allowing our data centers to perform optimally. It allows us to access our private data centers more seamlessly. This solution is flexible for various projects like cloud migration.

We use Cisco HyperFlex HX to share on the external cloud the ability to access earth science, geophysical data, and core applications.

The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center.

Cisco HyperFlex HX allows us to connect and scale a lot of different technologies. They're very reliable. It very rarely breaks or has a maintenance issue. 

Cisco HyperFlex HX is easy to patch and very cost-effective.

Cisco HyperFlex HX is very stable and reliable.

Cisco HyperFlex HX is very scalable for a large data center solution.

Technical support is excellent when it's needed through Cisco. It's usually fast, responsive, and done right the first time. 

On occasions, we've had emergency patching requirements. We worked with Cisco to update those environments fairly quickly.

The initial setup of Cisco HyperFlex HX is straightforward. It is easy to install with plug and play connectivity. It was standard with no complexity at all.

HyperFlex lowered our deployment times approximately 20%.

For the deployment, we used Cisco Professional Services.

We've seen our unit cost of providing services to data centers go down.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate this product a 10 for the reliability, ease of configuration, and customer support. 

Everyone should understand connectivity in private and public clouds. We require seamless connectivity throughout and especially with some of the security technologies.

Cisco HyperFlex HX is the best on the market. Everyone should consider it.

This solution is used for branch office servers.

Instead of having to go to multiple vendors to deploy a solution, it's just one place where we have everything that we need to set up and go.

The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers.

Having this solution even easier to manage would be nice.

The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running. I would like to have less clicking to deploy it, where it is ready to go out of the box with a default build. That would make things a little faster.

This solution was not stable when we originally implemented it. However, over the last eighteen months or so, the updates have made it stable and actually usable for us.

It definitely looks like it keeps scaling. We're not doing huge deployments of it, but it looks like it's easy to keep adding on to what we have.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

The initial setup was complex, but it was done more than eighteen months ago in the old form of things. It was a little harder than it is now.

We handle the implementation and deployment in-house.

We currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet.

We purchased both this solution and one from Nutanix to compare them.

This solution allows us to get up and running a lot faster than before. Instead of it being multiple days of cabling, multiple solutions, and getting the servers online, it now generally takes one full day to get it up and ready to go.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using this solution for our VDI. This is used to deliver our EMR and other medical and clinical applications to our residents and providers throughout the medical center.

One of the big benefits of using this solution is security. It allows us to authorize our residents to come in using their own personal devices to access any of our clinical applications and ensure that the PHI is secure and protected.

PHI is a major concern for us. Patient safety, patient security, and our data protection are the number one priorities for a lot of our solutions.

The most valuable feature for us was the time to delivery. We had a short window of about three months to implement because we had in incoming residence group of about a thousand users that they wanted us to have VDI up and running for. We were told about it in March by our CIO, and by June 1st it was up and running.

One of the challenges we have with Cisco, in general, is the multiple management platforms for the UCS, and I would like to see it all under one umbrella. If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great. There are three apps that we currently have to integrate with.

I would like to see them broaden their processor options. We've had some challenges with Intel, and I'd like to see them look at other potential CPU providers.

Stability has been excellent for us. We've been up and running on it for about eighteen months now, and we're in the process of expanding. We have a goal to have about six thousand users up and running by the end of this year.

The scalability of this solution has been excellent. We've been able to add additional HyperFlex units on the fly, and it's been pretty seamless.

So far, technical support has been very good. We've had a couple of challenges with some of the firmware updates we've had to do, and SMARTnet has been excellent at helping us to get through those.

Prior to this, we were using Cisco B200 Blade Servers for our normal VMR infrastructure, and we when we wanted to implement VDI we wanted to go hyper-convergence. 

The simplicity of the initial setup is one of the reasons why we picked this product. It is almost plug-and-play. It allowed us to install our first cluster of ten HyperFlex units, in each of our data centers, and within a couple of days, it was up and running. It was pretty straightforward.

We worked with Cisco and our reseller for evaluating the product, but when it came to the implementation, my team was able to do it on their own.

I do not have a good handle on the ROI, except to give an example from our implementation. Had we been required to buy laptops for all of the incoming residents, at say $2,000 per student, then we're talking $200,000. This is something that we didn't have to spend because we could deliver a VDI solution that lets them use their own personal device.

One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month.

We looked at everybody including Dell, HP, Cisco, and Nutanix. As we ferried through them we were much more comfortable with the Cisco product line, and that's why we ended up choosing it. Their technical support is very good, they had a great implementation for their HyperFlex, and we already had knowledge and experience working with the Cisco Server Blades. Cisco also had a competitive price point.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to have an understanding of the ROI. It is easy to jump in and see great technology, but you need to know what the long term cost is. One thing that we learned when we went into hyper-converged technology is the licensing costs that come with it. This is a yearly thing that you have to account for.

Overall, this solution was very easy for us to implement. Some of the challenges we're having are related to the management platform and the fact that we have to deal with multiple platforms at the moment. Once this is all consolidated, I would be happy to give a rating of ten.

Today, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is remote office environments.

The product has helped our organization work seamlessly with staff in remote offices by providing storage and compute resources. These two things have made a big difference in how we are able to work effectively as an organization with diverse environments.

The best part about this solution is feature simplicity from the user end, besides providing storage and compute resources.

I don't really think it needs to be improved as far as the product itself. I can't think of anything yet that it doesn't already do. It fills our needs. It would be best if it continued to meet the needs of technology as it advances over time.

I think the documentation is a big con for Hyperflex. More substantial, straightforward documentation would help end users make more of their investment. There really isn't a problem with product functionality.

So far we have had no issues with the stability of the product. It seems very stable and has performed as expected.

We have not needed to scale yet, but I would say — based on what we know that product can do and our experience with it — that the solution is very scalable.

Technical support has been good. I've opened a few cases and I got great responses in a reasonable amount of time. 

We had a new situation and a new problem that came up in our environment so we started evaluating other potential solutions. The solution we had couldn't resolve the new issue. We researched and learned that HyperFlex could solve it.

The initial setup was very straightforward. No problems at all.

We self-deployed the solution without the need for external assistance.

Before we made our final decision, we evaluated VMware as a potential solution but felt that the HyperFlex better fit our needs.

I would rate the Hyperflex solution as a nine out of ten. This is not because HyperFlex is not meeting our needs but because nothing is perfect.

We use the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series primarily for VDI environments.

As I am the integrator for the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series I've seen how it has improved my clients' ramp-up time to actually get the environment going.

The ease of use and the graphical user interface (GUI) are two of the most valuable features of this solution.

One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue.

Stability is 50/50 at the moment, based on the implementation experience.

I am very impressed with the scalability of this solution. It's easy to scale. 

I will rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

An initial setup is smooth when it's straightforward. When it has bugs, it's complex. With Cisco, we've experienced bugs with the software when we had to do updates and they were not fully documented.

I am the integrator. 

Our clients have definitely seen a return on investment using Cisco. They've even expanded the nodes almost within the first three months.

The biggest competitor is Nutanix and we considered using that first but when Cisco upped their game, their process became a little bit more streamlined. The hardware clients are more familiar with that.

Because of the bug problem I experienced with this solution, I will rate it eight out of ten.

We don't use the solution for security. It's for converged infrastructure. 

We're a reseller and implement it for our clients. 

The solution is very reliable. It can manage activities very well. Its operation management is quite useful. The product makes monitoring easy.

It's secure.

Cisco offers many features.

Cisco offers very good quality.

We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products. 

We've used the solution for just the last year. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable, and the performance is good. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. 

We have various customers using the solution. I'm not sure how many end users they have that use the solution. 

We have not had issues with scaling. 

Technical support is very responsive. 

We have previously used a variety of different products. 

The deployment was very easy. It might take a few hours and then it is ready to go.

You only need one person to handle deployment and maintenance. 

We are resellers. 

We're dealing with the latest version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.