Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

I use it for telephony. 

The telepresence devices are improved. You can call by phone handset only, video call, and integrate with Teams and other third-party tools.

First of all, Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing. They charge recurring fees every year for everything, even adding phones. Technically, it's good, but that is one fault.

Previously, it was perpetual. Buy it and use it. But now, it has changed. 

I have five years plus experience with it. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability as seven out of ten. Other vendors also have easy deployment methods, sometimes even easier than Cisco.

Our clients are enterprise businesses. 

Overall service and support from Cisco is very good. They give the perfect solution.

They are good, but the warranty claiming process is lengthy. We have to get on calls with different people. The channel partner also charges to claim it. The end-user should have all the privileges to claim the devices directly with Cisco.

We are not going to use Cisco for our upcoming large telephony project because of the high pricing and recurring charges.

The initial setup is easy. It takes a few hours. 

I am the implementor. 

It's expensive. Cisco is always expensive compared to other vendors.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the product for hosting our servers.

The platform provides robust compute power for hosting our servers.

The product pricing needs improvement. 

We have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for a year. 

Cisco's technical support is top-notch. They've been responsive and helpful whenever we've needed assistance.

Positive

We used Dell previously but have since used Cisco and HPE solutions exclusively.

The product cost is high compared to HPE solutions. However, maintenance and support services are included in the standard licenses for the first three years. 

Managing Cisco UCSB B-Series has been straightforward. While we've also used HPE in the past, both platforms offer similar manageability features. 

The documentation and support have been comprehensive. I rate it 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.

The solution's most valuable feature is KVM Launch Manager.

The solution's console could be easier for accessing and managing internal help documents.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

The solution's stability is good. Although, it is much more complicated regarding usage or management compared to other vendors.

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. It could be improved.

At present, we have implemented it on Hyper V clusters. We have eight blades on two clusters and six blades on one cluster. In total, we have 250 servers installed from those clusters.

The solution's initial setup process works fine.

The solution is a little more complicated compared to HP and PowerEdge configurations. Also, its KVM manager could be more straightforward similar to other vendors.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It should have KVM connectivity similar to Dell and HP. Also, HP has a storage blade that helps connect monitors in case of network issues. We can plug in and access the keyboard and mouse to start with the task. It is not possible with Cisco Infrastructure.

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.

Cisco UCS B-Series are the Blade servers where we have installed VMware.

The price of the solution could improve.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for approximately eight years.

The stability of the Cisco UCS B-Series has been good. We have not had a problem.

Cisco UCS B-Series is scalable.

I rate the scalability of the Cisco UCS B-Series a ten out of ten.

The initial setup of the Cisco UCS B-Series is not a problem.

This solution is deployed in India and it is being used all over. We do not have plans to increase usage.

We use a few people for the deployment of the solution.

We have received a strong return on investment.

Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution.

We plan to upgrade the Cisco UCS B-Series in 2024.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series a ten 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.

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.

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.

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.