Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

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.

• Management: The admin interface is very intuitive.
• Easy scalability: For example, when adding a new blade server to the chassis or when adding a new chassis, I can use the old management IP address to manage and create new profile.

I can deploy new resources for applications very fast.

Cooling. It is hotter than HP blade servers.

I have been using it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched because this product is cheaper.

Initial setup was straightforward with its interactive GUI.

We also evaluated Fujitsu products.

Get help from Cisco Support.

• Remote Access to the device
• Ability to scale to different servers
• Centralized management

Customers and organizations are benefited by its scalability, flexibility, and the fact it takes less time to deploy.

I've used it for almost one year.

In most of our deployments, no issues were encountered.

The product is stable (with new versions of the firmware), although previous versions were having some issue with stability.

In most of our deployments, no issues were encountered.

Very satisfied with the level of technical support from TAC.

We were using HP Servers but switched due to it having better features and scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward, and a of lot technical documents are also available from Cisco to help.

We have implemented it through our own team in-house.

It's a win-win situation for both customers and vendors due to its features.

Before we had to look for other options, but now we just check the different versions of the product checking the features.

• 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.

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.

• Easy to deploy, scale and expand based on a number of server range available.
• Centralization for different resources including network, compute and storage

Any Datacenter or organization implementing UCS-B series will find it easy for its IT team in terms of changes required to add more servers and redundancy.

Perfect device, but only if the GUI is made .NET-based, it will be more great.

I've had no issues with deployment.

I've had no issues with stability.

I've had no issues with scalability.

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.

4/5

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.

• 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