FlexPod XCS Reviews

We use it for VMware. Most of what we do runs on it. Our business runs on it. Probably 60 percent of our environment runs on UCS and 100 percent on NetApp storage, with Cisco switching everywhere.

The nice thing about NetApp is the ease of administration. We have a new storage admin who did not do storage at all, and he has fallen right in with it. There are no real issues. 

From a Cisco standpoint, we moved away from HPE Blade hardware into Cisco UCS hardware, and it is awesome. We like it a lot. They work well together. 

Both products are easy to use. Together, they are harmonious.

It is easy to set up and maintain. It has not had any problems. We like support from Cisco and NetApp, though not so much from VMware.

There is support for configurations and ways to do things. We just follow them. Knock on wood, we do not have any issues with it.

They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better.

No stability issues.

It should meet our needs. It is easy to add on to the tool. If we need to add a new switch, a new server, or a new chassis for Blades, it is easy. It is not disruptive. You just do it.

When we have to call for support, NetApp's people are great and their support is great - I like them as a company. Cisco support is fantastic. 

Although we have never really called in for a ticket under the FlexPod umbrella, it is nice to know that we have that option. If we have a VMware issue, a Cisco issue, or a NetApp issue, this is just a nice thing to have.

We had issues with our old storage provider: quirky stuff, weird outages, almost-outages, and performance issues. We had some IBM hardware and NetApp. Our good luck with NetApp made the decision for us when it was time for a refresh. We got rid of IBM and went all-in on NetApp.

We did a head swap upgrade about a week ago, which mostly went well for VMware systems. Everything inside the FlexPlod upgraded fine. We had an AIX system with an issue during the upgrade, but that is not my area.

Relax, as it will not be that hard to implement.

No downtime, which is a good thing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Ease of use.
• Support: Getting support from a gigantic organization that is ancient, like IBM, was a real challenge. We had some weird bugs that cropped up with IBM and their software which is developed for array replication, in conjunction with VMware. We do not have these issues with NetApp. It just works. Support and supportability are very high.

Customers use it to consolidate their resources, rather than having a more extravagant and very high-cost center. FlexPod seems to be a simpler, more economical solution and, obviously, it is a lot easier to work on.

Our clients will use it for anything from healthcare (a lot of surgical) to major consumer distribution, universities or higher learning institutions. Large customers, like Digital Realty, who do business with smaller companies, all try to get the same type of solution.

I am from the old school. When FlexPod came out, everybody ran away from it, and went to GDC at Cisco. However, here it is, and it is huge and very convenient. The advantage is being able to consolidate everything into a relatively small chassis.

I like the combination of the brands that they decided to include, in terms of its compatibility, e.g., they integrated UCS into this solution. That is the real advantage: its partnerships.

I look forward to seeing some of the innovations that they come out with for the FlexPod solution. It has been one of those products that I do not criticize it too much. I just look forward to seeing what else is there and the new thing that they are going to come out with. So far, I have been happy with what I have beem seeing.

However, for a lot of our customers, the complexity of FlexPod can be a little overwhelming. When I talk to the customers and they stop speaking technically, they start speaking emotionally, that is when I realize, "We need to get back to talking to them about what FlexPod is." It is a term and a partnership. 

If there is something wrong on the NetApp side. Let us focus on that. I have noticed a lot of customers, they will kick it over the fence. It is FlexPod; it is that mystery animal. The room for improvement is to better present it to those users, so they will not have to be afraid of it. Once they realize, "This is actually a good product." They will turn around on it and stop trying to run away.

It is pretty stable. There are a few tweaks needed. There are a few things that they can always improve on. Altogether, when you are looking at that many different flavors being mixed into the same bowl, it works well. I am happy with that.

It is definitely scalable. This is a great platform that you can build from. If you need to think about scalability in the future, this is the solution because you can stay small and build it out as you go, as you grow, and stay ahead of the market.

In terms of selecting a vendor to work with, collaboration is important because the product is the product. It will sell itself. What supports that? Collaboration. This means being able to work with technical support and engineers to deliver a solution for the customer, who does not care about the challenges that we have to face. 

The customer just wants the product and that is our goal: To be able to deliver something from behind the "green curtain." If they love it, they buy it, then they want to buy more of it. We have to plan for it and integrate it with our future endeavors. That is what we are all here for.

I have not paid attention to ROI. 

As far as the real value, it is a simplistic consolidation where I can actually talk to somebody on the phone, and say, "You should not have to leave the room or go to another floor. This should be laid out like this." 

It is very convenient, and that is a good value right there.

Usually, I will find some type of "phoned-in designs". Something they want to call their "FlexPod." There are a lot of imitators out there. There are a lot of guys who will buy some NetApp and Cisco products, etc. Then, they will say, "Let us put this all together." However, FlexPod has something good here. That is why it caught my eye.

Do not be afraid of it. Roll your sleeves up, and get into it, as it is not that hard. Speak the language, and if you don't, call somebody.

The use case is that it is running with multiple applications with VMware, and this a two data-center model, Flexpod, along with NetApp storage. It's quite useful.

Prior to FlexPod, we only had a physical environment. At that time we decided that we had to go to a 100 percent virtualized environment. From a physical environment, we were able to work into the FlexPod where we leverage all the virtualizations.

It provides us with a lot of agility, on-demand or through orchestrations. We deliver hundreds of servers. It has created a lot of agility in this environment.

First of all, it's a converter. It's not dependent on, it's not coming with specific storage. I can leverage its multiple storage abilities. We have various kinds of storage in our environment, like IBM or NetApp. We can mix those types of storage with the FlexPod environment.

The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors. This is the one big problem we have faced with FlexPod.

I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod.

We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM.

FlexPod is pretty stable. It has worked in this environment for more than five, six years and still, for the next four to five years, there will be some piece of the FlexPod here. It's pretty stable.

There is a scalability issue with the FlexPod in terms of scale out. We always have to go and procure this piece in the data center. We always have to order a new piece of equipment for the FlexPod. That increases the cost.

We have professional support. They are pretty responsive and they support us.

We switched because of the virtualization. We were a completely physical environment and we wanted to go to a virtual environment. That is the reason we went with FlexPod.

Regarding our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, this is a very big organization and there are multiple vendors. So it's all about the partnership. In this organization, we choose the vendor at the very beginning for three years or five years and go with the long term.

Although I was not involved in the initial setup, I saw when we were moving from physical to virtual that it was pretty smooth. The initial challenge was the configuration within the data center. But I don't think it was a technical challenge.

Right now the Cisco is there. This is a Cisco shop and an IBM shop too.

I would rate FlexPod as a seven out of 10 because it has gone through a long journey in our organization and we have had pretty good support. The FlexPod environment still exists and, according to the roadmap, it will go to 2020.

In terms of advice, this is all about converged and hyper-converged. If you are looking to convert your environment, then I would definitely suggest going with the FlexPod.

In our facilities we use FlexPod to host business applications: bpm'online (our tool for the help desk), SugarCRM, Microsoft Exchange Server, Cisco CallManager, some applications related to telephony and collaboration, and for demonstrations of our solution.

On some occasions, when we have needed virtual machines to install new applications, the administrator has provided them in a matter of minutes. Similarly, we have created virtual desktops for environments of 50-100 users in minutes. Finally, the integration with VMware NSX has allowed us to recover from a failure of the main site in a matter of minutes.

• Centralized administration with Cisco UCS Director allows you to perform all administrative functions from a single interface, as well as automate tasks.
• UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes.
• FlexClone allows you to create copies of volumes in seconds, and without occupying physical space.

At the moment I do not find any functionality that could improve, other than perhaps the automation interface.

I consider this solution a 10 out of 10. It is a very complete solution and easy to administer.

I am working on a FlexPod environment, though it is not the exact FlexPod box from NetApp. Our environment is custom made, resembling FlexPod with UCS chassis, NetApp storage, and Cisco MDS. We have five HA pairs and a MetroCluster, along with Cisco MDS in front and Brocade as back-end switches (for MetroCluster).

It is a very well-thought-out solution with great virtualization. A good option we have is mapping a storage LUN onto an ESX cluster. That way, in case a particular ESX is down, it can migrate (using vMotion) to another host in the cluster, resulting in high-availability.

The ability to create vDisks on NFS exports is an added advantage. This is very helpful when we reach RDM limit.

Currently, the only issue we have is with our backup solution. We have SnapProtect from NetApp as our backup tool. While taking VM backups, SnapProtect’s requirements say that all VMDKs should be on the same datastore, but from the VMware perspective, all VMDKs should be spread out. This is an ambiguity that we have in our environment.

The solution is really good but with 7-Mode I would rate it at seven out of 10. With NetApp  Cluster Mode the rating is higher.

The key features and functionalities of NetApp FlexPod that the company uses run:

1. VMware Horizon View
2. standalone workloads.

The environment is NetApp Controller FAS8040, Cisco Nexus switches (5000/7000/9000) and Cisco UCS Server with fabric interconnect.

A single FlexPod can support a load of 2,000 - 5,000 employees without downtime.

SolidFire all-flash block storage in an existing FlexPod data center environment. This improves the agility and performance, including the additional load of cabling.

• Support for multiple vendors' hardware
• Support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches
• Automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD

My use case was a small FlexPod architecture (seven Cisco B-Series Blades, a FAS8200 in CDOT, two Cisco Nexus switches). One rack. We used Cisco 3xxx switches. Six profiles were defined so six blades were running and one was a spare.

On top of the infrastructure we used Oracle Hypervisor (OVM); the VMs were based on Oracle Linux. On top the virtual machines we hosted Oracle Database (pinned, to reduce license costs) or applications.

So two levels of flexibility per DR were activated: one based on profiles and one based on the hypervisor.

The customer added the FlexPod-based solution to a real-time system to improve their overall system with a new analytics environment.

• Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. 
• The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.).
• No single point of failure is identifiable.

FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design.

Company-wide production and development of private cloud infrastructure.

• Scale up/down
• CD/CI pipeline
• Development environments scale up/down

• Converged infrastructure
• Engineered Reference Architecture
• Continued evolution of the architecture
• Manpower savings
• Ease of automation

Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available.