Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution to host all of our USX. The solution was deployed for the hypervisor.

The most valuable feature is definitely the service profile. I feel it provides a more stable environment, with very few issues with the hardware or fabric. These issues are rare and usually minor.

The cost is expensive and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for almost eight years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support was excellent; it was professional and very effective. The support I received was satisfactory, although it may have been due to the fact that my issue was not particularly significant.

The initial setup was straightforward and we have not encountered any issues in a very long time. I believe the FCOE protocol has been improved since we first used it, as the IQ N number was not generated automatically. This was the only issue I have encountered with Cisco UCS, but since then it has been quite stable and robust.

The solution is definitely expensive. Compared to the more in-demand hyper-converged environments such as Nutanix or DVX rail, Cisco UCS B-Series is even more costly due to the expensive fabric interconnects. The only benefit we will get when adding more chassis to the two fabrics is the ability to scale up. Therefore, if we are only using two, three, or four chassis, the cost is high.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We have four people that use the solution and one person who is primarily responsible for any related UCS.

The most valuable feature that the B-Series has is related to the structure and architecture of the solution because in these solutions, you are using fabric interconnect as an interconnect device. The beauty of fabric interconnect is that it can work as in-house mode.

Fabric interconnect is the main component in the UCS solution. Fabric interconnect can act as two modes. One is in-house mode, and the other one is switching mode. The recommended one is in-house mode. When it works in in-house mode, it means that it won't process any storage, like flagging things, zoning, etc. It won't process Spanning Tree Protocol either. It will just proxy everything to the higher switch.

For example, if you have storage network traffic, the fabric interconnect won't process your flagging. It will make a proxy, and send it to your NPIV storage switch. It acts literally as in-house, and that makes the solution and architecture very easy, convenient, and scalable.

The other important feature is the switch technology that Cisco uses on their chassis. It's not like those of other brands. The beauty of Cisco is that with traffic interconnect, your network and storage won't come down to the chassis level.

It will stop at the fabric interconnect, and the traffic between the fabric interconnect and the chassis acts very similar to the fixed technology that Cisco uses between 2K and 5K. This means that the same architecture and the same technology that we use between 2K and 5K is used between the fabric interconnect and the IO module that's used at the back of the chassis.

This means that when you are using the IOM input/output module, the IOM module on the back of the chassis will not be like a regular switchboard. It will be just IO. So, this means that it is scalable. You can add as many chassis as you want to this whole solution, and you can remove them. You can move one chassis to another chassis. You can move one server from chassis one to chassis eight or chassis seven. You can have a lot of clusters. You can have a lot of failovers over the whole package.

Recently, with the new chassis, UCS X-Series, that Cisco recently introduced to the market, it is much more scalable.

The license is expensive.

Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.

It's very stable.

Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers. It's one of the most scalable solutions in the whole world.

The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at ten.

I use the solution in my company in our virtual environment along with VMware, and it hosts around 23 virtual servers while also being able to offer features in the area of unified collaboration in our call center.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it offers reliable and easy functionalities. It can be used in a very easy manner, making it not a complicated tool.

The high price of the solution is an area of concern where improvements are required.

The product lacks to offer AI functionalities along with integration capabilities. From an improvement perspective, I want some AI features to be included to enhance the integration capabilities of the tool.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for around two months.

It is a very stable solution, like a rock.

Until now, I haven't used the scalability feature of the product. I will have to use the scalability features of the product after five to six years of usage of the product.

If I consider the use of the solution in my company, I would say that there are around 600 endpoints in my organization.

There are 90,00,000 users of the solution.

I have worked with different products from Cisco since it is the DNA of our company's network, as it looks after our infrastructure network, which includes Cisco Core Switches and Cisco Access Switches.

The product's initial setup phase was complex. The product's initial setup phase is not easy for anyone.

For the deployment process, I have a third party person in Egypt who I contact to help with the implementation, designing and so want to improve the solution and to make it work correctly in our company's environment.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Around 51 developers are required to take care of the deployment and maintenance of the tool.

There is always a need for a third-party provider or a partner to take care of the setup phase of the tool in your environment. My company's in-house team can manage the tool's deployment process.

The benefit of the product stems from the reliability and the dependability offered. You need to learn to be satisfied with the product, and it is not worth worrying until everything becomes bad with the product.

In my opinion, everything related to the product is very expensive right now. Every three years, I need to renew my license and support the product. I don't have to pay any extra costs in addition to the standard licensing charges attached to the product. Every time I have to opt for the renewal of the license, I am shocked to learn about the increase in the price of the product. If you purchase a solution for a particular amount, and then during the renewal process, you learn that you need to pay double the amount of what you had paid previously, you will definitely feel that you are paying a lot of money.

In terms of the ability of the product to improve our company's data center's computing efficiency, I feel that it is a very good solution for me right now, especially in areas like production and workflow. I am very satisfied with the product.

I think that every product from Dell, Cisco, HPE, or any other vendor can be well-integrated with the solutions in any infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of the product for workload optimization stems from the fact that I use the many dashboards offered by the tool. With the tool, I have many separate dashboards. I don't have just one in the dashboard where I can see the integration and take care of the management.

To others who plan to use the product, I can say that Cisco UCS B-Series can be good for networking but very bad with the security part.

In terms of the flexibility of the tool to adapt to technology needs, I think it is a very good solution. I can recommend the solution to others who plan to use it. Cisco doesn't need any recommendations from my end because it is the backbone of the networking infrastructure throughout the world, and it is currently present in 70 percent of the market share.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

The UCS Manager, UCS Blades including chassis, and Main Data Centre Virtualization Physical Infrastructure on VMware between sites act as our critical and secure data center environment.

This solution is reliable, expandable, agile, manageable, and scales easily, allowing us to focus on using UCS Manager. We are now expanding the Cisco Hyperconverged solution embedded with the UCS manager.

This is the plus to expand the reliability, expandability, redundancy, and availability of our data center infrastructure environment.

This host-provisioning solution gives us peace of mind, SLA level, and ease of management from the operation team. It is reliable and gives me confidence when I upgrade firmware and expand the capacities of the data center.

Think about adding compute in 30 minutes instead of hours of technical effort. It reduced the amount of time that tech spent on support and operations instead of maintaining the whole infrastructure level.

ROI for the UCS manager solution is high and has lifted pressures and stressful burdens upon SWE.

Overall, all functionalities are excellent.

The feature that I found the most value is the abstract and stateless capacities. 

USC Central seems a bit confusing for technicians.

Many functionalities that are not used for a small environment should be enforced at the enterprise level.

I would like to see USC Central offered free for use, as well as made simpler to use for technicians. This will improve its adoption rate, especially for environments that are not exposed to the internet.

We have been using UCS Managers and UCS Blade for more than five years.

Stability-wise, it is excellent.

This is a scalable product.

Technical support is excellent.

With the help of Cisco tech support, I just finished an upgrade of firmware and felt that the support team is helpful and proactive in helping customers.

I feel that Cisco tech has value. They provided me assistance and guided me through difficulties. Overall, I felt that they were excellent and I appreciated it very much, especially the consistency in following up on what is happening, including progress.

I had used HP enclosures in a different environment.

The initial setup is always straightforward.

We initiated the engagement with Cisco Tech Team, and eventually, we can take ourselves.

The ROI is huge and I was surprised after seeing it when the environment was set up and stable.

I was not involved with the specific pricing agreement, so I don't know. However, I am familiar with some of the aspects.

Generally, the cheaper, the better. I believe that this is part of the procurement management that must be involved with requirements. Pricing will be based on your requirements so it is important to plan, engage, and negotiate directly with the Cisco Account Manager.

I have an excellent relationship and experience with them. They are accommodating in all areas such as reaching out, checking and engaging in setup and configuration of equipment that has arrived, training, help in designing, consulting, pricing, and licensing.

As part of our evaluation phase, we researched three vendors. Each was assessed using a scorecard to rate each in terms of functionality as it related to our environment. The scale was from one to five.

Overall, this is an excellent product.

We use the solution for our network system.

The product is easy to use. It's user-friendly.

The product could be made more secure.

I have been using the solution for approximately three or four years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability a nine or ten out of ten.

The tool is scalable. We have 30,000 users.

The technical support is fast.

The initial setup was easy. Our IT department deployed the solution in our organization.

We use Cisco because of its VPN. I will recommend the product to others. It is easy to use and easy to connect. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

We host mostly our production environment in these Blades. We choose this series due to the reliability/stability and for ease of scalability. We are a 24/7 business and uptime is most critical for us. Stable environment with 99.99% uptime including a good scalable architecture is something like "Gold with Fragrance"

Management wise, I liked the "Service Profile" concept where we can create the appropriate profiles for the blades and just deploy them with ease. Time management and getting the configuration right is important so that there are no hassle during the initial setup. Performance wise, I like it better than the HP Proliant servers.

We jumped from old HP servers to this UCS and, of course, we very much like it in terms of its security, its interface, its functionality, the CPU, the memory and its central management interface. The computing power that it's given us has greatly improved the processing of our system. Overall, it's good.

Integration with the storage to get a heatmap of what's going on in the storage site could be improved -- the dashboard, that kind of thing. We have a virtualized environment and it's the same dashboard that links together the front end, the VMware and the backend storage. We have to use multiple views, multiple solutions for that. We log in to multiple places to see what's going on in the storage, what's going on in the switches, on the Blades, on the VMware. It would be great if there was a single platform, a dashboard that could integrate all of those. That kind of improvement wouldn't just help me but would also benefit management. If they want to see what's going on, for example, to get a five-year forecast, and the dashboard could show how much space is left for computing power, or show that something is not working, that would make a difference. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

I especially like the scalability aspect because, compared to the HP servers that we had before, those were rack-mount servers whereas the Blade is just a plug and play. If we need more computing power, we just bring a new Blade and plug it in and auto-conservation setup in the profiler takes over the new Blade and it's that easy. We are a team of three admins using this solution. 

We haven't had a chance to contact Cisco for any issues because everything has been running smooth and fine. And we have our corporate team as well. If there's an issue we reach out to them first before reaching out for support. It's been three years and we haven't had any major issues, we've been able to solve anything that's come up. 

In short, management with a central dashboard is really good as compared to the older HP Proliant environment. You have a bird's eye view of your infrastructure through the dashboard.

The initial setup was pretty good. It was a new thing for us and took us some time, but it was good, it was straightforward. We had to deploy it here first to make sure everything was up and running. It required a lot of regression tests before moving it to the actual production site and that's what took time. It wasn't the time taken to configure it, but the time taken to deploy the whole system in the production site. We did the deployment ourselves. 

Having experience with the product for over 5 years, the ROI is definitely over our expectations. The level of performance improvement has increased in such a way that we are able to scale up with the ability to process more data (faster), making our customers happy with the output. 

Price wise, Cisco B-series was better. 

We compared it with HP C7000 series blade infrastructure but the Cisco B-Series cost that was presented to us and the comparison of performance details were superior.

I haven't had experience with others series, like the C-Series. I hope they are good but so far, after three, four years, this has been good and we haven't had any issues. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use the solution to help manage our data centers.

Stateless Blade is the best feature. If we have a blade go down we find that the server continues to work well.

The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

Cisco UCS B-Series is stable.

The solution is scalable by adding additional hardware.

The technical support is good but can sometimes be delayed.

Positive

We use HPE BladeSystem and Cisco UCS B-Series but we are going to replace them both with the Cisco X210c M6 series because of the high performance.

The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration is also simple.

The implementation is completed in-house.

The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Around ten administrators are required to manage the solution.

I recommend the solution to others because it has good performance and is highly stable with little downtime.

We are using it in the converged infrastructure with the common UCS Manager to push out:

• Profiles
• Firmware
• Console access
• VLAN configurations
• Troubleshooting

Running in the VCE Vblock gives us the flexibility to deploy a large virtual workload of servers. We use a mix of mainly Windows servers and a few Linux appliances.

I had one blade server fail. The replacement was up and operating quickly after the blade server was swapped over.

Smaller locations are held up where they use a pair of converged infrastructure interfaces for redundancy.

To deploy a standard Cisco Blade system with redundancy for maintenance and reliability you have to purchase two converged infrastructure 6296 or 6396 interface / switches, and the chassis, uplink interfaces, plus the blade servers to drop in one or more blade chassis. From my point of view the initial cost to do this for a small regional office where we usually have the computer in a dedicated network closet for the switches and servers.

Cisco does now have a “Mini” solution where they have put the converged infrastructure and management into the chassis via the slots where the uplink interfaces normally install. This setup can support multiple blades and even external C series chassis in a converged environment all sharing some form of external storage from what I have read but never used or experienced.

Most of my companies need is for data distribution from a file sharing server(s), a domain controller and possibly a local database server. I can cover this all in one 2U server from another company that I can cram in 3-6 TB of DAS / RAID disks for file storage with enough RAM and CPU cores in 2 sockets to cover my compute / VM needs.

My demands for servers in most remote sites are different than most. Our end-users all have either a laptop or powerful CAD workstation to do their engineering on. We don’t do VDI via VDI terminals. We do use VDI for engineering apps in 2D on our VBlock and in C-Series UCS servers with NVidia shared video cards for CAD / 3D rendering in our VDI pools.

The original M2 servers were in operation for more than five years. The new M4s have been up for under a year.

There was only one server failure during my use of 24 blades in my old system. There were 20 blades in my new/replacement implementation. In reality, this is a small installation.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. We added blades and upgraded memory along the way. We had open slots in the chassis and added additional blades. We upgraded the RAM in existing systems for more VM headroom.

There were no issues with technical support, as most was handled via VCE.

We had standalone 2U servers from HPE that were tied to a SAN for shared storage.

Limited memory expansion was what we had previously. We did dual Vblock installations to absorb the multiple little clusters of VM hosts that we had on separate servers.

We still use HPE servers as standalone VMware hosts in smaller sites.

The newer generation HPE servers have very high disk capacity servers where we can get 3 TB of disk in a 2U host.

The Vblock system was installed and operational at handover. We had to provide IP ranges for servers, management interfaces, etc. However, the VCE installation teams did the actual configurations of the hosts, SAN, and network connectivity.

Although I was not completely involved in the pricing or licensing costs, I do have to monitor licensing allocation of VMware CPU licenses.

I know that Cisco licenses the number of ports and uplinks on various interfaces inside the Vblock. However, we have not done any upgrades beyond our initial purchase of the replacement Vblocks to run into any new licensing additions.

We looked at other considerations, such as BladeSystem from HPE and standalone server stacks, at least five years ago when we purchased the original set of Vblocks.

It was the only integrated system that fit our needs. It filled the requirement for new computing power, an updated network, and SAN storage. It also filled the expansion possibilities of a data center in a box with almost one point of contact for support.

Look closely at your needs.

• Do you need more computing power and memory or storage expansion possibility?
• Do you need redundancy in installation sites HA/DRS?
• If you do HA/DRS, does it need to be near real-time disk writes, or more managed recovery/failover?