Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. These systems are for advanced data.

The template feature is very good, and it works well.

The Boot from SAN function is good because using OTV, we can boot the device from any remote location.

I like the level of complexity that this product offers because I have a lot of relevant knowledge, which makes troubleshooting and performance tuning easier.

This product uses a converged network adapter because it is the only way to provide flexibility with both fiber and ethernet connections.

I have been working with the Cisco UCS B-Series for approximately three years.

This is a stable product. However, if the customer is using devices from different vendors on the same network then there can be some small problems.

This product is very much scalable. Once you are using active/passive devices, you can switch them depending on the needs of the infrastructure.

Only one of my clients has this device implemented.

The technical support is very good. They are very knowledgeable and have taught us a lot.

I work with a variety of Cisco products. For example, I have a lot of clients that are using Cisco firewalls. As such, I have a lot of experience with Cisco devices including HyperFlex, UCS, Nexus 7K, 5K, 2K, and 1K virtualization.

Some of my clients are using products from vendors such as HP or Dell, rather than using a Cisco Blade Server. I also have customers using VxRack and VxRail. the Cisco products consume less energy, and I prefer to implement them.

The level of complexity for the initial setup depends on the client. For example, new clients usually only require a normal design. For clients that redesign their network, there is some inherent complexity.

In general, a hyperconverged system is very easy to configure.

This is a premium device and our clients are not as concerned about the reasonableness of the price compared to satisfaction with their productivity.

This is a product that I recommend. If somebody instead chooses to implement a Dell, then they will have a converged system or will be using NetApp. This is much more complex than setting up a hyperconverged system.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

My company uses Cisco UCS B-Series for multiple use cases. Mainly, we use the product in our company for the general IT infrastructure deployment.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its massive computing power, so you can have big data or mission-critical applications running on SQL Server.

The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details. The price of the product's license could be improved.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for almost seven years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution, but it requires a lot of the skills to be able to manage and expand the product.

Around six to seven customers of my company work with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers.

The solution's technical support is good and knowledgeable.

The initial setup can be complex, even for someone skilled enough to deploy the product. The deployment is generally not easy since Cisco UCS B-Series directly interacts with Cisco Fabric Interconnect.

The solution can be deployed in five to six days.

The deployment process for Cisco UCS B-Series consists of an approach in which you just provision the servers and upgrade Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects. Whatever the hypervisor will be, you can take the product to the next level when starting with the product.

An experienced person can handle the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money.

There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product.

There is an additional cost consisting of the modules a person wants to use, apart from the standard licensing costs of the solution.

Cisco makes it possible for its users to work with the new series of its products, which is Cisco's M6 series blade servers, and Cisco also allows for a lot of enhancements to be made. It is a fine solution for big customers.

Considering the multiple use cases for which the solution can be used, others who plan to use it can consider purchasing and deploying it.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

This is an on-premises enterprise solution that is primarily used for Microsoft, Linux, and Oracle workloads which require intensive computing for hosting/running clustered and standalone applications.

The solution is very reliable in comparison to the other brands. Additionally, the uptime is very good, and they ensure 99.9% of uptime.

The configuration could be simplified as the initial setup process is complex.

We have been using this solution for eight years for multi-organizations.

The scalability is very portable and swappable. So we can add and expand resources easily. Dozens of people are using the solution in our organization, and six are responsible for managing the infrastructure as administrators.

We have had experience with the customer service and support team multiple times when there is a hardware failure, and we requested an RMA for the replacement.

The initial setup is difficult as it is a Unified Computing System, and expertise is required to configure it. Implementation normally takes more than two hours to initialize a new blade, or DC server and initialize a new chassis. However, this solution requires days because the cable installation, uplink planning, deployment, and everything is included. So we need to create a complete project plan for the technical side to deploy this equipment.

It is expensive, which is why limited customers utilize it. However, it is enterprise-class, reliable, stable, and fast. In the past eight years, I have never had any bad experiences with Cisco UCS or faced any outages.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is a tricky piece of equipment with state-of-the-art technology, reliable parts, good stability, and robust features. When you need to compute, it will provide you with speed. However, the solution can be improved by simplifying the configuration.

Why pick a UCS blade over a Dell, HPE or Lenovo system? The answer depends on what application I need to run. If I want a small-scale, 3-4 server application space in a localized area, I want a rack mount, for a price advantage. If I need a larger-scale virtualized environment, I prefer blades, and for the lowest OpEx as I scale out, I find Cisco's UCS lets me manage a larger footprint with fewer people.

Previously, we focused on CPUs and servers, relying on the Intel cadence for change. With Cisco UCS, we became network-centric and changed our mindset to abstract the server, making it a stateless object for workloads. Managing blade servers logically lets us take full advantage of Moore's law – which started with 640 cores per fabric and now provides 5760 cores for B200-M4 blades in our standard 20 chassis pods; more workloads per pod, and fewer people to manage them. This has significantly improved our OpEx costs.

Cisco is behind as far as SSD qualifications and options allowed, relative to other vendors, but that is in keeping with their philosophy of a stateless working environment. If I add a unique storage attribute to my blades, I encumber it with a state that requires manual intervention to move around.

SSD evolution is coming hard and fast with higher density, lower cost options popping up each quarter. New form factors like M.2, U.2, Multi-TB, NVMe and now signs of Optane are emerging across a range of price points turning the once stolid server domain into the wild west. Dell and HPE have field qualification processes with vendors such that very soon after new products are shipping, they are available for use in their servers.

The process is slower for UCS as Cisco must perform extensive validation to assure compatibility with UCS-Manager. Does the device respond in time to blade controller logic, are there issues with time-outs for UCS-Manager that might have either type 1 or type 2 fault errors. Hence the array of new SSD products are more robust with HPE and Dell than for Cisco.

This goes to the core difference in architectural philosophy between the Legacy server vendors and Cisco that calls for a stateless environment leveraging networked storage so that any workload can be readily moved to a new server as a more powerful system is deployed, or a fault occurs on the old server. If an HPE blade has a local boot option with a new 1TB SSD – then you cannot move that workload remotely to a new 2-socket 36-core blade. You have to have a technician go on site to physically pull the boot SSD from the older blade and insert it into a new blade, then confirm it got the right one. This adds labor cost and slows down the upgrade process – increasing OpEx costs to manage the legacy infrastructure.

We have used this since inception in 2009.

The change in mindset from building stateful servers to stateless devices managed across an intelligent fabric with logical abstraction took about a month for operations to come up to speed on; no looking back since.

We went through the original teething pains of any new system. In particular, once we had our operational epiphany on what the potential was, we were limited by how fast features could be added to UCS Manger. With XML extensions, UCS Central (Manager of Managers) and UCS Director (Automation), we have enough on our plate.

Early on, we encountered scalability issues – UCS was to support 40 chassis – but it only did 10, then increased to 20. 20 chassis (160 servers) is more than enough as Moore's law, increased CPU core count and higher network bandwidth all made for the ability to place more workloads in a pod than we were comfortable with. So, it rapidly caught up.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent. Cisco understands what is needed and it plays to their networking strengths. Ironically, most of my previous rack system problems came down to network constraints as we ran into switch domain boundaries, VLAN mapping issues and so forth; the basic blocking and tackling for Cisco.

We previously used HPE. They had a good blade system and good racks, but their iLO is expensive and gets very complex at scale.

Initial setup was straightforward. More time was spent educating us on UCS Manager, the logical tool, service profiles and the other tools of automated provisioning than physical connectivity, which is child's play.

We bought through a vendor, who showed us how to set up and some tricks of the trade to short circuit the learning process. Then, after a few months, we were cruising at scale.

ROI is not something we share, but I will note that we now use 2 persons to manage 1600 servers in two remote data centers. This is across 25 domains that can all be seen at once and, as alerts come in, drilled down and addressed from a web console.

SSD evolution is coming hard and fast with higher density, lower cost options popping up each quarter. New form factors like M.2, U.2, Multi-TB, NVMe and now signs of Optane are emerging across a range of price points turning the once stolid server domain into the wild west. Dell and HPE have field qualification processes with vendors such that very soon after new products are shipping, they are available for use in their servers.

The process is slower for UCS as Cisco must perform extensive validation to assure compatibility with UCS-Manager. Does the device respond in time to blade controller logic, are there issues with time-outs for UCS-Manager that might have either type 1 or type 2 fault errors. Hence the array of new SSD products are more robust with HPE and Dell than for Cisco.

This goes to the core difference in architectural philosophy between the Legacy server vendors and Cisco that calls for a stateless environment leveraging networked storage so that any workload can be readily moved to a new server as a more powerful system is deployed, or a fault occurs on the old server. If an HPE blade has a local boot option with a new 1TB SSD – then you cannot move that workload remotely to a new 2-socket 36-core blade. You have to have a technician go on site to physically pull the boot SSD from the older blade and insert it into a new blade, then confirm it got the right one. This adds labor cost and slows down the upgrade process – increasing OpEx costs to manage the legacy infrastructure.

Before choosing we also evaluated HPE, Dell, and IBM. We all found that, aside from the physical differences, they had the same architecture and OpEx; external management; local switch infrastructure in each chassis; complex routing rules when scaling domains; and challenges in provisioning new units. Once we learned the "UCS Way," we were more efficient.

We use Cisco UCS B-Series as a central computing environment.

The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment. We have a virtual network interface, which means that we can easily reconfigure the machines according to our needs.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than ten years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a scalable solution with a fairly advanced environment that can scale easily. It is not cheap, but it provides the ability to scale up in terms of computing, networking, and memory. Around 2,000 people are using the solution as our central computing. In terms of management, we're a small team of ten people working with the solution. The solution is being used daily in our organization.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team takes some time to resolve our problems. It took them some time to ship us a spare part when we had a problem. For a big organization like Cisco, technical support is not straightforward and could be better.

Neutral

We previously used HPE and Cisco. We switched to Cisco UCS B-Series because we learned to trust Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series was a very stable and good solution. When we bought it last time, we managed to use it for many years.

The solution’s initial setup wasn’t easy.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. The solution was deployed by two people in a few days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a four out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is part of our VMware environment. The Unified Architecture is one of the unique features of the solution that is very usable for us. With the feature, we can immediately understand that we need to configure a separate environment and easily configure networking to allow us to distribute the environment.

The solution is deployed on-premises, but it's managed by the cloud environment. The solution’s maintenance is done by one person. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Cisco UCS utilizes Service Profiles for server provisioning. These are logical profiles that are comprised of many smaller parts, such as BIOS settings, NIC settings, HBA settings, Firmware packages, boot policies and more. Creating consistency within your compute environment has proven valuable. Having the capability to add chassis and/or blades to my environment with just a few cables, and bringing these servers online with the required settings based on my profile is most valuable. Apply a Service Profile to a new, replace or relocated blade, and Cisco UCS takes care of the rest, provisioning as you expect.

Cisco UCS has reduced our physical footprint, drastically simplified management and created strong partnerships between engineering teams.

Software defects that result in false environmental alarms have been a pain point for us. These defects are not operational or performance impacting, but they do result in many hours troubleshooting to rule out any potential risks.

I've been using it for years.

As long as everything is correctly designed and properly patched, deployment is a breeze with instantiation of VMs on-top of a configured UCS environment possible within just a few hours. This is aggressive scheduling, but it’s absolutely possible given the numerous options available for scripting and automation.

We hit a software defect once that caused a reload of some critical assets. This was immediately resolved and is the only true case of a stability issues I have seen.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Cisco TAC is typically great to work with. UCS has a call home feature that will automatically open TAC cases on your behalf when issues arise. I’d recommend calling in critical cases to ensure timely response.

The initial setup as a first-timer can be overwhelming, but once you complete it, any subsequent setup is straightforward. The biggest thing is making sure you properly design the solution and develop a scalable schema. Take into consideration other environmental variables that require specific configuration, such as hypervisor BIOS settings versus bare-metal BIOS settings.

I recommend having someone experienced with UCS perform the initial design and deployment. This could be someone you have in-house, or someone you contract. You’ll want to make sure your schemas as setup properly, any unusual requirements are handled properly, and profiles are built according to best practices for your particular environment.

Cisco UCS changed the server blade game, converging network and compute into a single profile-based platform. Now with HCI, Cisco is converging storage into UCS as well. I recommend getting in contact with Cisco and one of their channel partners for a whiteboard session, design conversation and potential proof-of-concept. This worked well for me in the past. I have since been capable of designing and implementing Cisco UCS environments without aid from external resources, only asking for design validations.

The solution is being used for our internal use along with VMware.

The solution is very unified and the technical team is very supportive, no help is needed from outside vendors. 

Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware. 

I have been using Cisco for the last ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

It is a scalable solution. A total of fifty users are using the solution at the moment. 

The technical support team is knowledgeable, customer-friendly and fast in their responses. 

As long as one knows the process, the installation is straightforward. The deployment takes a week's time as it's a big installation. A group of engineers are required for the deployment. The deployment is done by taking track installations and then a few more updates and putting them under the sphere, and you should be using Cisco UCS Manager for the updates.

I have seen a return on investment. 

Cisco is compatible with Mac and Dell. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for infrastructure management.

The architecture of this solution is very valuable; it has five traffic interconnects, and uses a network highway so bandwidth is never an issue.

The main issue with this solution is that it is quite vendor-restricted, meaning that when we use third party software, we cannot use all of the available configuration tools or pre-validated design features.

We would like to see a storage solution added to this product as, at present, there is no file system storage available.

Also, this product is very expensive, and whilst they will apply discounts for larger projects, these are not as competitive as those offered by other vendors of comparative solutions.

We have been working with this solution for over eight years.

We have found this to be a very stable solution.

In our experience, this is a scalable solution.

We find the technical support team to be knowledgeable and responsive, but they are often slow to come back with a root-cause analysis of our issues.

Positive

The initial setup for this solution is easy and straightforward.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.