Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution for a server.

Some of the features I like from this solution are it has a fast configuration, it is not complex, and has high availability. 

A long while ago something went wrong with the solution and we had to back-up to the cluster, some stability issues could be improved.

For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle. I recently worked at a company in Cambodia where we were using Oracle, we were having some difficulties with applying the licensing between the solutions.

I have been using the solution for approximately two years.

Over time the solution became more unstable. This is why I planned for a hyper-converged HyperFlex Infrastructure. Hopefully, this will reduce the percentage the server consumes and an overall performance improvement.

We have an internal team that does the support for the solution.

The setup was not complex, there was nothing standing out to me that was difficult.

The price of this solution compared to others is fair.

We have been evaluating Cisco HyperFlex which we will be upgrading soon. I compared the two on itcentralstation.com and downloaded the reports, it is better. There is a current need to choose this upgrade and my team will get on it soon.

I wanted to try out Cisco products because most of the big industries use them such as banks, IT, and telecommunications. Cisco itself produced the server and at the time I researched more about Cisco and then I want to try it. This is why I invested in a tool from Cisco. Additionally, I plan to implement level IP2, HyperFlex soon.

I would recommend this solution for the financial sector and big industry enterprise companies that can invest with Cisco long-term. The scalability, high availability, and security all combined is a good offering.

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

We use this product for SAP HANA in a QA development environment. It is at the core of our business.

The most valuable feature is the service profile.

The amount of RAM that it supports for HANA is good.

The maintenance is very easy.

The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler.

The administration is somewhat complex.

I have been using the UCS B-Series for more than six years.

This is a very stable product.

The UCS B-Series is easy to scale. We have approximately 1,000 people using this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times and I would say that they are efficient.

Prior to working with this product, we used the HPE c7000 enclosure. Once we started using SAP HANA, we implemented Cisco. Our main environment still uses the HPE.

The HPE is more difficult to maintain because all of the addresses are hardcoded inside the enclosure. With Cisco, it is much easier.

The initial setup took us approximately one week. If you are connecting to a SAN then you need to bring up all of the virtual VLANs and set up the storage. It takes a lot of time.

We had assistance from the vendor for our deployment, and our in-house administrators are taking care of the maintenance.

Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees. The only thing that we pay for separately is VMware.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Deployment of new blade/host is quick via using hardware profiles
• No ethernet or fiber cabling required for new blades/hosts
• No zoning required to SAN storage for new blades/hosts
• New chassis can be quickly attached to fabric interconnect for deployment

• Faster deployments of new and replacement hardware
• Compact footprint saves valuable space on the rack.

We have used it for over four years.

Deployment was smooth.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

We used standalone servers which were configured in clustered configuration, and switched because we wanted to improve efficiency.

The initial setup was straightforward. For the hardware setup, you do the following

• Non-blocking 10gig fiber lines going to core network switches from fabric interconnect
• Fiber lines for SAN storage to fiber switches from fabric interconnect 
• Converged data (Network & Storage) on 10gig lines from chassis to fabric interconnect
• Blades/hosts use Converged Network Adapters (CNA)

For the configuration using Cisco UCS manager

• Hardware profiles
• Boot from SAN
• Initial storage and network setup

We implemented through a vendor. If you are new to Cisco UCS platform, I would recommend implementing through a vendor.

Plan carefully and purchase adequate licenses with the initial purchase for better pricing.

• Dell
• HP

Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades. 

I have been working with the product for one year. 

I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten since we encountered bugs during the upgrade. 

The product is scalable and my company has 5000 users for the solution. 

The product's tech support has good people. However, the people in level 1 support do not know what they are talking about. Level 3 support is good. 

Neutral

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. We have two administrators for the product. The tool is a good product but maintenance is not easy. 

The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization.

The management interface needs a lot of improvement. As it is right now, it's a pain to use. It's not user-friendly.

For some clients, it may be useful if it was possible to switch the role for a server. I myself am running a VMware shop and so I would not personally gain any benefit from this, however, I see the value it would have for others - especially service providers.

I've been working with this solution for seven years at this point. It's been quite a while now.

The stability of the solution is fantastic. It's one of the greatest selling features. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's extremely reliable.

The solution scales pretty well. We have not had any issues with that.

Currently, I'm the only one using the product in our organization.

I've never used technical support, so I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness.

I also have worked with IBM as well. 

At the time, the biggest difference was pricing. Also, there is the ability to switch roles or templates on the servers within IBM. However, it's not anything I have had any use for.

In our case, the solution's initial setup was not straightforward. It was rather complex.

It was part of a FlexPoint solution. And it was one of the first FlexPoint solutions delivered in the country. It was not the same solution delivered as the salesperson had promised.

You can typically get reasonable pricing on the solution. The hardware itself, however, isn't the biggest cost. The biggest cost is licensing, and that can be quite expensive.

If there are other organizations considering the solution, I'd strongly advise that they get training on the management side. It's very important to do this in order to successfully implement and use the product.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a seven. It's good, however, it could use a simpler management structure. Cheaper licensing would go a long way as well. The UCS isn't the expensive part. It's more the Microsoft and VMware and the cost of running that.

After having used, configured and deployed HP and Dell blade systems, I was rather impressed at the time the initial setup of the UCS blade system took to achieve operational status. I was also very impressed with the thorough thought that went into the UCS Manager console and its capabilities as a whole. The conceptual layout of the UCSM was a technical breakthrough and though I tried to not compare it to HP or Dell, it was impossible not to. As our implementations grew and our overall knowledge of the system also grew, there was no turning back. The Cisco UCS team made what used to take hours to configure, setup and deploy, literally take minutes using their Cisco PowerCLI toolkit.

Another aspect of the Cisco UCS system that overshadows that of other technologies is the networking backbone that supports the blades themselves. Cisco created a network switch (control plane) in essence that caries both server traffic and uplink traffic from a single pair of "Fabric Interconnects". These Fabric Interconnects are capable of FC, FCoE and traditional Ethernet, thus making all the ports unified. Acting as the "brains" of the UCS Blade Server system and depending on the version of the Cisco Fabric Interconnects, the pair of fabric interconnects are capable of managing several UCS Blade Chassis and therefore eliminating the need to purchase more switching unnecessarily. The UCS Fabric Interconnects are capable of managing up to 5-10 Blade Chassis with 8 blades per chassis on a single pair of Fabric Interconnects. This is quite a large number of blade servers running from a single pair of Fabric Interconnects.

As you can see, the system scales nicely and the price point drops as your infrastructure grows in size, thus making the initial ROI even more attractive and feasible to make a business case in its favor.

The product’s most valuable features are:

• FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet)
• iSCSI services
• QoS policies
• Call-home
• Direct connectivity to SAN Storage
• Hardware abstraction via Service Profiles
• Virtual Network Adapters from the Cisco VIC 1240 & 1340 series interfaces
• Diskless servers (boot from SAN)
• Reduced server provisioning time
• RBAC security
• Manageability or ease of use (single point of management)

Our company provides solutions that enable our customers to succeed. We thrive on our customers’ ability to see the value in our proposed solutions, so as to bring to their organizations a product that not only solves their current infrastructure constraints, but also resolves those that may arise in the future. We have many partnerships with several vendors in the same technology space, but we have aligned with Cisco due to their excellent blade server products and also their marquee products in the network switch arena.

Today, our business continues to grow with the inclusion of Cisco UCS at every possible opportunity. Now, even more than before, with go-market campaigns that focus on the Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and accompanying storage arrays that are supported by Cisco and Cisco UCS.

Areas that require improvement are notably small in comparison to other similar products. The UCS system would benefit from less-expensive performance monitoring tools or other third-party tools that perform this function. Surprisingly enough, that is all I can come up with at this time.

I have used it for five years.

Stability is a non-issue with Cisco UCS. We have not had any stability issues and to just mention, the Cisco UCS team employs strenuous testing mechanisms of all the UCS components. They provide this for all their firmware updates prior to public release. This is not to say that we've not had any issues, but the issues have been extremely small in comparison to the amount of systems we've deployed. Those issues were quickly identified, rectified and the systems were brought back online in a prompt manner with minimal customer business impact.

Cisco UCS scales rather well and while all other systems are online, therefore allowing for in-place upgrades and updates. The system provides great scalability and versatility in regards to system growths and business requirements. You can easily add additional chassis and blade servers with no impact to the systems running in production.

Cisco TAC has been phenomenal in most cases, but we have had a couple of minor instances where the issue took a bit longer than it should have to be resolved. I’d would say we have had a 97% success rate in most of our cases we’ve opened through Cisco TAC, that resolved our issues within the four-hour window we had expected and subscribed to.

We previously provided our customers with the HP blade system solution. As we began to become more familiar with the Cisco UCS system and we found it to be just as stable, if not more stable, we therefore shifted our solutions to include Cisco UCS B Series blade systems in lieu of HP. Our decision for this paradigm shift was due to the following factors:

• Ease of setup
• Reduced complexity of the network
• Overall technology solution, support and maintenance
• Product scalability
• Performance
• Cisco’s easy procurement quote, build and ordering process

Setup for a first-time administrator of UCS will be somewhat time consuming, in the sense that Cisco UCS virtualizes just about every aspect of the hardware. The installation requires the installer/administrator to pre-provision several aspects of the physical hardware in a virtualized sense. As an example, the installer needs to pre-provision MAC addresses, fiber-channel HBA WWNN & WWNP namespaces, KVM address pools, management (KVM) address pools, iSCSI IQN names, iSCSI IP address pools and other items that become part of the “stateless” server attributes. These all become inclusive to the service profile assigned to each server, but are also unique to each.

Once the installer has some familiarity with the Cisco UCS blade server system, the setup phases become much like setting up a traditional rack server(s) and their respective networking in many ways. Just like anything else, once you’ve done it a few times, you become more and more proficient in your abilities to execute in a more expedient manner.

The Cisco UCS solution is more expensive in price comparisons with other similar solutions. You will be very happy to have had spent the money upfront and you will look like a rock star to your management and customer base by choosing Cisco UCS blade server system for your infrastructure needs. The pricing and licensing of the Cisco UCS system is comparable to other systems. Overall, your licensing and pricing costs will decrease exponentially over time in comparison to the other vendor branded blade server systems. I would recommend you at least allow yourselves the opportunity to review the Cisco UCS offerings and schedule a demo from your local Cisco UCS product vendor.

We also evaluated:
- Dell
- HP
- IBM

Find a local Cisco UCS Partner that has a lot of experience setting up Cisco UCS. It does require some infrastructure knowledge for northbound connectivity outside the UCS blade server system and has to be well thought out in terms of how it will integrate into your existing infrastructure. Other than this caveat, the UCS System is easy to install, setup and configure once you have it in your possession.

Our relationship has grown stronger with Cisco due to our own internal decisions to encompass the Cisco hardware where and if at all possible. Our decision to use, sell and deploy Cisco UCS is solely due to all the reasons I’ve already mentioned plus more. Cisco has surely outdone the competition here on this one.

Centralized Management using UCS Manager, and State less Servers.

Scalability, Flexibility to reuse the same Server with different projects multiple OS (VMware ESXi / Centos, Microsoft Windows) just in minutes by creating new service profiles.

Stability of some of the old versions has afew bugs. Although I have to mention that Cisco has been releasing revised versions of Firmware very quickly to fix the bugs.

More then one year

No, but Cisco UCS is a complex system, it is very easy to deploy if you have the knowledge and understanding of the product, I have recently commissioned a new Cisco UCS Datacenter after all the rack and stack its very easy to manage the product via Cisco UCS Manager.

Some of the version of firmware does have issues but Cisco is very good at fixing the bugs and giving new firmware versions.

Cisco UCS is very good with scalability, this is one of the ups of the Cisco UCS and I have used this a lot.

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

I have had few issues when upgrading the firmware and the Techsupport of Cisco TAC was very quick in picking up the issue and resolving it.

I'm happy with the Tech Support.

Dell and HP Rack servers, issues with scalability. Space consuming.

Yes it was easy to setup provided you know the basics of Cisco UCS. I have done the low level design for our new site and it was very straightforward.

When it comes to racking I have to admit the chassis is very heavy with all the components as its a 6U chassis. So make sure you remove all the power supply modules and IOM's and Fans then rack it. Once its placed then you can easily slide everything back and blades into the chassis.

We had used a Cisco Partner and they did a very good job.

HP and IBM

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It is scalable and it controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.

Probably the Cisco Integrated Management Controller.

Remote access to the server is very useful.

They use LSI for their RAID, while they may be robust RAID controllers, they lack a lot of functionality that Adaptec or HP Smart array.

Two years.

The LSI controller is very "finiky", even though it had deployment software, the only way to successfully configure the RAID was via the boot command line.

No, we haven't had issues post setup.

Probably the RAID card really limits what the servers are capable of if you require storage.

I haven't needed to deal with technical support yet.

We use this as a potential alternative for HP ProLiant servers.

There are some quirks in the setup (e.g. for non Disk servers, you need to go into the CIMC to enable the SD Card for HyperVisor Installs, not the BIOS) but generally its fairly straight forward.

We haven't had a full life span on the Cisco UCS but so far we have not had to do nearly as much firmware maintenance as the HP Servers.

No but we have used HP for a number of years and IBM before that.

These are good servers for SAN environments, I think their Disks (RAID) need a lot of improvement before you consider them as a storage server.