Cisco UCS Director Reviews

In most of the projects I've worked on, the use cases are tied mostly to orchestrating the on-prem infrastructure, and specifically to achieving a self-service for infrastructure. For example, we have the Cisco infrastructure, which is UCS, which also has other integral components like the storage network. If you want to provision workloads on this infrastructure, we also want to take care of these third-party products such as NetApp and Cisco switches and routers. So we use the UCS Director to define a blueprint or a workflow, which we then use to orchestrate each and every step that is supposed to be part of this automation.

I've not seen many products out in the market like UCS. If the infrastructure is Cisco, but the UCS Director has more templates and blueprints that help us jumpstart Cisco infrastructure automation.

The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products.

This is because the UI has been a bottleneck, especially when working on complex workflows. The Cisco UCS Director does not provide some of the capabilities of the UI that VMware provides. We also found a gap in the version controlling the code that goes into the UCS Director at the time. Version control has been a problem.

The one feature I would like to add in the next release is to make it more user-friendly in terms of the UI. Although there's a lot of effort in coding, it could have given a better UI and a better version control system.

I have worked with the solution in the past 12 months. 

My impression is that this tool is stable. I did not see any events where it was unstable.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a six, on a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being super scalable. The reason for that is that the tool provides multi-cloud capabilities, but the UI is the version controlling. These can be a bottlenecks that prevents anyone from just going and consuming the full capability of the tool.

The initial setup is easy. It comes as an OVA template and just like any other virtual machine, you can spin it up and give it an IP address.

The time it takes to deploy this solution mostly depends on prerequisites. If you have all the prerequisites in place, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to fully deploy UCS Director.

Although the product itself is described as an orchestration and automation tool, it's still a platform that allows anyone to come and develop. It has very limited out-of-the-box automation that you can just go and use, which means you must have programming skills and also be able to understand the various infrastructure components. If we have to compute a storage network together, we also need the infra knowledge. At the same time, we should be able to speculate that in a code using the Director platform. It's not a buy-and-use product like any other. There's a development effort involved in the UCS Director, like for all the automation.

We evaluated VMware's vRealize Automation, which I would actually vote for if you have to compare it with Cisco.

The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost. That is why we just decided to use what we already had.

Overall, I would rate the Cisco UCS Director solution a five out of 10, with one being very poor and 10 being excellent. This is because I have worked on a similar product, VMware. I saw firsthand a lot of things that the other product does better than UCS. The open source developers are huge for the platform, like VMware. In Cisco UCS Director, I think most of the development is done by Cisco themselves or the affiliated partners, so there aren't too many improvements from the integrations perspective.