Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

Cisco UCS B-Series's most beneficial feature is agent management for print. Its performance is rock solid, and its servers are excellent.

The cost of the product is its biggest weakness. It is more expensive than the competitors. 

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for 15 years. I have also worked with Cisco UCS C-Series and Cisco UCS X-Series.

We use Cisco UCS B-Series predominantly and have 50 end users in our organization.

It is easy and less time-consuming to deploy the software. The time taken for the process usually depends on the size of the installation. We had a team of around ten administrators for the implementation.

Cisco UCS B-Series is highly-priced. It is suited for medium and large enterprises.

It is a good tool. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I use this solution for general company services, including file-sharing, Microsoft services, active directory services, and backup solutions.

The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series.

The graphic code that UCS can support is limited and less accessible than other systems. 

I've been using this solution for three years.

This solution is stable and powerful - we've had no problems with it.

The scalability is powerful.

The initial setup was complex, and deployment took two-and-a-half years.

UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers.

Cisco is a huge company that can support a lot of services and has the most powerful website, which means its systems are the most stable. I would advise potential customers to use and enjoy it because it is the greatest experience. I would give this solution a score of ten out of ten.

We use it in our data center. In our infrastructure, we virtualize our servers.

I like that it's very manageable very easy to use and configure. I am not an expert, but the graphic user interface is quite simple very easy to use. It's a complete solution.

We have to have Java to manage the infrastructure. It would be great if we can manage the infrastructure through a web browser. 

We have Dell EMC, and I would like to connect my product directly to the chassis. I would like to have an interface to integrate the storage directly chassis and not through the network. If that could be possible, that would be great for me. 

I have been using Cisco UCS B200 since 2015.

We haven't had any problem or any outage, and it's always running. Every process and everything you run, memory and cache memory, is always running. It's very stable.

I think it's very scalable. I have an opportunity to provide for more Blade Servers, and if I need more power or resources, I just have to provide the Blade Servers. Right now, we have two administrators.

When we had a problem once with a virtual server, our Cisco partner came to us within three hours and provided support. It was very good.

We have stand-alone servers, and we used Dell Servers. For example, we installed VMware on top of the server. When we needed more power or infrastructure that's a little bit easier to buy, we bought this Cisco UCS platform.

I don't know if it was straightforward because our partner set up and deployed this solution. It took about 20 days to implement this solution.

We received the infrastructure entirely configured by our partner. It was a very good experience.

Before you buy infrastructure like this, I would recommend some training. It'll help to get really good training in infrastructure management. For example, in my case, a quick overview when I started to manage the infrastructure definitely helped. It's very hard because at the beginning you are a little lost. The infrastructure is easy to manage, but it would be better if you take time before you install the infrastructure to learn more.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco UCS B-Series a nine.

We use it for computing and virtualization. All the blade servers are used for database uploads.

We are a system integrator. So, we sell multiple type of software and hardware solutions. We implement solutions and provide support. 

We have multiple versions of the solution currently running. It depends on our customer.

The overall consolidation of hardware is helping us.

• Manageability
• Performance

I can connect Cisco UCS B-Series to multiple chassis and rack servers using a unified platform, then manage them on a single console.

The solution is stable. We haven't encounter any failures or problems in these particular servers. We have had three to four years without any downtime happening.

The technical support is good from Cisco. The type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco.

The setup is a bit complex in terms of configuration. While as an admin or an end user, it is very easy to use. The configuration is a bit complex, as it requires very high technical expertise to apply it.

We are the integrator. We use two engineers for the deployment.

The time for deployment depends customer to customer and the number of servers that we deploy. For example, our last deployment took three days.

It requires some basic configuration, then you can just plug and play.

We still have multiple vendors that we work with. It depends on the customer requirements whom we select to work with.

We work with this solution because we find that the technology is superior to others.

We have also evaluated Dell EMC blade and rack servers, along with Cisco rack servers.

Our customers are very happy people.

The UCS environment as a whole. The hardware is easily swappable and, utilizing the boot from SAN option, you can always keep your server intact due to the service profiles. So if your blade has failures and you have a hot spare, you can transfer the service profile to a new blade and be operational in mere minutes. Huge for uptime and perfect for environments like VMware ESXi hosts, which is what I use them for primarily.

We can be scalable to a greater degree using Cisco UCS. The options available and the connectivity to a Nexus switch with universal ports have been a game changer.

The UCS manager interface needs to be cleaned up a bit and can be streamlined, but no major complaints. Get off Java once and for all and release 3.2 so it can be all HTML 5.

I have been using Cisco UCS since early 2011, so six and a half years.

B-Series blades, along with the C Series tack mounts are the most reliable server hardware platform I have worked with in my 20+ years in the industry.

None. Cisco UCS, to this day, has been the most easily scalable server product I have encountered. Hyper-converged solutions have potential, yet have not shown me that they are scalable at an enterprise level the way the B Series UCS are at this time.

Some of the best in the industry. Always helpful and mostly flexible.

In the past, I have used rack mount and blade solutions from Dell, HPE, and IBM. None of them have come close to the combination of performance and reliability that I get from Cisco.

Initial UCS setup is complex, but once you have your service profiles (templates) configured, adding new blades and provisioning boot LUNs is very easy. Cloning options make it even more so.

Nothing shocking. Very straightforward. Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing.

I have evaluated dozens of server solutions (Dell PowerEdge, IBM X series and HPE ProLiant) and many, many more.

Do it and don’t look back. Just make sure you get strong in-house knowledge of UCS early on, unless you are willing to outsource UCS support to an MSP. It is easily learnable, but there is a bit of a curve to support the overall UCS infrastructure at the start.

The ability to scale to multiple blades and multiple blade chassis quickly and easily.

Customers see benefits in the reduced time to deploy virtual servers. The ability to scale out quickly is an example of that.

The management interface in the current version is Java based. I would like to see a move away from Java based management consoles, which I think Cisco has already road-mapped for the UCS product range.

We completed a deployment of this solution in February 2015.

No, the product has been stable.

It is designed to address scalability.

Cisco technical support is always available 24x7. I rate Cisco technical support 10/10.

We specifically implemented UCS to cater specifically for a customer’s Cisco Unified Communication products, which were all running on Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS). The Cisco MCS platform is now End-of-Life, so UCS was the life cycle replacement option. The MCS platform also had limitations with virtualisation which the UCS product suite overcomes. More recently, the customer’s platform services team have recently purchased another Cisco 5108 blade server chassis and more UCS-B blade servers to replace their HP blade server solution.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

The solution can be useful for cloud solutions and they are automatized. Everything is automatized, and it's highly available.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

Everything is nice and I like that it is centrally managed. 

It's very easy to manage once you have everything set up.

The performance is great.

Technical support is helpful.

We sometimes have small issues with the hardware elements. The network interfaces could be better. The product needs to develop better firmware.  

The solution is difficult to set up. You need to be experienced in the product in order to be able to implement it.

I've used the solution for more than three years in this company, and in my previous company, I used it for two and a half to three years as well. In total, it's been five to six years. 

The solution, for the most part, is pretty stable. There aren't really bugs or glitches and it doesn't really crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable. 

The scalability of the solution is good. 

I'm not sure how many people are actually using the product. In America, we utilize about 3,000 servers and we utilize 4,000 servers ourselves. That's a total of 7,000 servers.

Technical support has been very good. We don't have any complaints. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup can be a bit difficult and complex. This is because everything is centralized. That said, once you have everything deployed and up and running, the maintenance is easy and minimal. While you have to sacrifice something during the installation, after that, it's easier to manage. 

It took us about two months to complete the implementation.

We had a third party that handled the implementation process for us. We had a lot of server blades to set up.

I don't have any visibility on the licensing setup. That's managed by procurement, actually. I don't have any information about it.

We use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and other organizations. 

The solution is primarily used for computation purposes. 

The hardware available for the solution is very good. It's quite reliable and robust.

The visualization is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward. 

The scalability is excellent. 

We found that the stability is extremely reliable. 

Technical support is very good in general.

The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable.

I've been dealing with the solution for about three years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability and performance of this Cisco product are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

The scalability potential of the product is very, very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with relative ease.

Technical support is pretty good. We find Cisco to be knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we receive overall. They're great. All UCS products have great support.

We found the initial setup to be pretty easy. It's straightforward. I wouldn't describe it as too complex or difficult. A company should have no problems deploying it. 

We have seen an ROI and would recommend the solution based on those observations.

The solution is quite expensive. It's pretty high, especially when you compare it against the offerings of other vendors. They need to be more competitive in terms of pricing.

We're a Cisco partner.

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I can recommend the solution wholeheartedly to other organizations. I would really recommend it due to the fact that it's a really stable technology. Also, it can produce a return on investment for organizations as well.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the product at an eight. We've largely been quite pleased with its capabilities.