Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

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 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.

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.

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.

Customer Service:

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

Technical Support:

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.

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.

Great consolidation, high mem capacity, excellent reduction on ports.

Very tightly integrated, so once you are all in, you are likely to be there for a long time.

The most valuable features of the Cisco UCS B-Series are reports for virtualization and the large memory it has. 

Cisco UCS B-Series competitors have similar features as they do, Cisco needs to make some changes to make their offering better.

The integration and support could improve, there are some challenges. Additionally, the competitor has its own storage in its portfolio, Cisco should have the option as well.

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

Cisco UCS B-Series is a reliable solution.

I have found the solution scalable.

The technical support of the Cisco UCS B-Series is good.

The initial setup was difficult for us because we are used to the old systems. With the new solution, it is quite a different experience.

Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series an eight out of ten.