Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

• Virtual NICs/HBA
• Nexus FC/Ethernet convergence

VirtualNICs/HBA allow us to redesign completely the IO schema (network and storage) without needing to upgrade or acquire additional hardware and controllers.

• Hardware platform configuration

I have used this solution for three years. We are currently using Cisco UCS, Chassis Model UCS5108, I/O Modules UCS-IOM-2208XP, Fabric Interconnect Model UCS-FI-6248UP, and Cisco Nexus 5548.

We had some issues with certain NX-OSs in the Fabric Interconnect.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. I’ve previous experience with HPE BladeSystem. UCS looks to me more flexible and powerful.

Initial setup was complex. UCS deployment & management requires deep knowledge of the platform.

It is expensive (like all converged platforms). From a cost perspective, UCS must be evaluated seriously in order to determine if the company requirements justify the acquisition. It is important to take into account that UCS is an end-to-end solution. Integration with Cisco Nexus is a must.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options, but in the convergence market, UCS should be evaluated as a clear option to evaluate.

Training, training, training and planning, planning, planning!

• Flexibility,
• Management
• VMware interoperability

It's helped us to develop a new platform for virtualization, with a small footprint, and improved our computing power efficiency.

It could be helpful to have a wizard to make the setup routine better, and a wizard to help with the managerial processes to avoid misconfiguration issues.

We've been using a Cisco 6296, 5100 Chassis, B-Series server B200M3, VIC1280 for two years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They are very professional.

Our system used to be based on the usual rack servers, with Dell M1000 based blades.

The hardware setup was easy. The initial setup through the manager requires a deep understanding of the platform.

We implemented it with the assistance of an integrator who were a Cisco partner. I definitely recommended you get professional assistance to help with the initial run phase. It's critically important to provide formal learning to the internal team that will be in charge of the day-to-day operating activities.

I'd recommend that you create a "turn Key" solution pack, including both hardware and platform licensing, and guest licensing. You could also get this by implementing it through re-sellers.

We also looked into HP servers, but decided that Cisco was better in most areas. Combined with Nexus switches, it provides us with a versatile solution for a virtual platform including SAN fabric capability build in, networking flexibility and SDN, and is better to management.

You need to have at least a basic understanding of the product concept and architecture variations in order to better understand use cases and ROI estimation in order to get the initial sizing right, and create the right scaling plan.

The Dual Fabric design allows for online/in-service upgrades during production with no impact. Also, single point of management for all server profile and firmware management allows for guaranteed uniformity in the datacenter.

I have deployed 2-3 dozen UCS systems and managed many more for customers. Customers always love the unified management, speed of setup, and the improved performance after migration of workloads to UCS servers.

HTML5 interface is a much needed improvement over the old Java interface, but still needs a little work.

I have deployed and managed Cisco UCS solutions for approximately 5 years.

As with any system, there are very occasional bugs. But Cisco is quick to remedy any issue. Firmware is often already out to fix issues that we run into.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is excellent.

I have experience with HP, IBM and Dell rack servers. I switched to UCS when I joined a Cisco partner and learned to deploy UCS.

when customers are first introduced to UCS, the setup is somewhat complex. Yet the learning curve is reasonable.

Cisco UCS is a fantastic product that is widely deployed with excellent support. Additionally, Cisco has developed CVD’s (Cisco Validated Designs) that assist partners and customers to properly deploy Cisco UCS with most major storage vendors. CVD’s are highly detailed deployment guides which are comprehensively tested by Cisco to ensure quick, highly reliable and predictable deployments.

The features of Cisco UCS that are of the most value to me is the ability to build Service Profiles for servers based on your needs. You can add HBAs and NICs to servers as needed, and you can remove them just as easily. 

Also, with UCS, updating firmware and drivers has been simplified and can be done throughout the system simply by associating new firmware policies to the hardware. You can also run different versions of firmware as needed to support legacy applications.

UCS has made it possible to replace and upgrade servers quickly and easily while keeping things up and running for the enterprise. 

Replacing the Fabric interconnects and IOMs can be done while the system is up and serving production data. You can almost effectively negate downtime from your organization as a result.

I would really like to see an integrated management interface for all the products for FlexPod, as well as a verification tool like Immersive that can give you feedback about your compatibility with FlexPod guidelines.

Get a qualified vendor to help you go through the process, and take some training to get familiar with how things work together.

The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved.

In particular, integration with other products is difficult, especially for logging purposes. In this regard, it is not very good and improvement is required.

Technical support should be more timely.

We have been working with the Cisco UCS B-Series for more than a year.

This is a stable product.

The technical support is good although they respond very late to open cases.

One of the other products that we currently work with is Huawei, and they give us much cheaper prices. They also have a good product, which is sometimes even better than Cisco. Nonetheless, my team has a lot of experience and expertise with Cisco.

The initial setup is simple, and not very complex.

The pricing for Cisco products is always high.

My advice for anybody who is considering Cisco UCS is that if it's within your budget, I recommend it because they are popular in the market and it is easy to find experts.

Overall, this is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

The Cisco UCS Blade Server system is our newest blade server system. We bought the server as the winning server system for our Oracle Peoplesoft Campus Solution system. It bested bids from Oracle, IBM, HP and Dell.What we really like about the product is the scalability of the entire server system. the platform's architecture ensures that we can easily grow our systems as the need arises.The server system also has the necessary features that we want like tight integration with virtualization technologies and storage systems. We have gone full virtualization with our Oracle system implementation and we are very satisfied with the implementation.Lastly, Cisco really did a good job in making sure that such a server system does not produce unnecessary cable clutter.

The downside when using anything from Cisco is the required knowledge needed to ensure proper implementation. The server system can be very daunting for an untrained system administrator to configure.Also, the server system can consume a lot of power. Proper preparations must be taken to ensure that the electrical and cooling facilities where the new server will be housed is sufficient for this server system. I would definitely recommend this product as its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Just make sure that you buy all the necessary components to have a complete system.

Choosing the right partner for implementing the system is also critical. They must be knowledgeable in implementing the Cisco UCS system as its a very complicated system to set-up. The implementation must also include a system administrators training so that company administrators can manage the system after configuration and deployment.

We are using this solution to connect to a rack system.

The GUI makes is simple to use and deploy.

Managing could be improved. It's too hard.

The pricing could be less.

I have been working with Cisco UCS B Series for six years.

This solution is stable, we had not had any issues.

This solution is scalable. 

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good. We had two or three issues, but they were able to solve them.

The initials setup is straightforward.

It requires some preparation. It's not as easy as Microsoft, but for Cisco, it's still good.

Pricing with Cisco is very high.

The price is very inefficient.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

The VM-FEX, hardware integration with VMware vSphere.

It's faster to provision virtual servers than physical. Also, it has very good orchestration with UCS Director 5.2.

The UCS Manager is written in Java and has many problems after the new Java releases. It should be rewritten in HTML5.

I've used it for one and a half years.

It was not a problem.

It is very stable.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

4/5

Technical Support:

4/5

IBM Blade Servers,was in place previously.

It was straightforward to do it. You need to have expert-level knowledge in LAN, SAN, and servers to be able to do it properly

I did by myself.

No, Cisco UCS was the stuff we wanted.