Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We are a state-affiliated financial company that performs credit recovery from bad banking and we bought four Cisco HyperFlex HX hosts five years ago which came as all-in-one solutions with processor, memory, and disk. These hosts are all situated on-premises.

Within the next ten years, when all credits have been recovered, our mission will end. Unfortunately, our current edition of HyperFlex will end sooner than that, because it will be end-of-life in 2024.

With our four HyperFlex HX hosts (consisting of processor, memory, and disk), the performance is very fast and we have no problems at all. In all of the five years that we have been using HyperFlex, we haven't needed to increase our budget to buy additional hosts. In my opinion, it's a pity that we will have to change it out for something else in 2024 due to it being end-of-life.

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies.

That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application.

Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. 

One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

I have been using Cisco HyperFlex HX for five years.

We have servicing contracts with all parts of our infrastructure, but with HyperFlex you typically only need one person to manage aspects such as implementation and configuration. It does not need much in the way of maintenance, which makes working with it very easy.

The one problem we have, though, is that when you have 20-50 VMs and you want to do updates for either HyperFlex or VMware, there's usually a bit of extra work to do in this process, not knowing whether your interventions or updates will cause problems. But overall, it's easy, and I would rate HyperFlex's stability a ten out of ten.

Cisco HyperFlex HX may be expensive, but this is offset by the fact that it is a highly scalable solution, even though we're only a small team at the moment. Our admin team is only four people, but there are about 200 employees who make use of its resources throughout our company. I would give it a ten out of ten for scalability in this regard.

On the other hand, the scalability is somewhat reduced when you consider that our physical HyperFlex infrastructure will be end-of-life in 2024. Because of this, we are considering changing to a cloud solution, or perhaps another kind of physical solution, once our term with HyperFlex is complete.

Cisco's technical support is knowledgeable and they understand the criticality of the solution. We have used their support about three times and each time they were quick enough to solve the problems we've had until now. This is a plus because we have to do frequent maintenance when it comes to applying security updates for all of our hardware and software.

In the last five years, the only major incident that I can recall was when we struggled to integrate HyperFlex HX with our fiber optic switch redundancy system.

Positive

Before Cisco HyperFlex HX, we used a physical server provided by HP. The reason we switched to Cisco's solution is because it was one of the first implementations in Portugal and Cisco made us a good offer to switch over.

The offer they gave us was, more or less, the same cost as any other standard infrastructure of its kind, and at the time we decided that it was a very good investment. In the first proposal we chose to purchase three hosts, but at the end of the negotiation we added a fourth host because we knew that if we needed the fourth host later, we would have to pay more than in the initial offer. I don't know what the cost of a new Cisco solution would be nowadays, but back then it was a great investment, especially as compared to the standard infrastructure we had with HP.

The initial setup was difficult mainly because the product was entirely new to us. I believe we were the first, or possibly the second, company in Portugal to implement Cisco HyperFlex HX, so naturally it was tough in the beginning. Fortunately, we had help from Cisco and the deployment, which took place over the span of a few weeks, was a success.

After the setup, we thought everything would be easy, but still it was somewhat difficult for the reason that it was all new to everyone at my organization. After a bit more hands-on experience with it, however, it wasn't too difficult.

The biggest challenge of our deployment was the integration of HyperFlex with our fiber optic switch as well as with our backup switch (for redundancy). When we shut down the primary switch, the HyperFlex infrastructure would sometimes go offline, causing about 30 of our VMs to enter into an unworkable state.

We eventually resolved this situation by re-configuring the redundancy method for our switches, because they were originally acting as if we only had one switch and not two. This solution entailed splitting the switches into two types, one active and one passive, and after we implemented this change, the HyperFlex solution began working properly and we haven't had a similar problem since then.

In total, putting this implementation into production from our previous VMware infrastructure took about two to three weeks, and if I were to give a rating for the ease of setup, I would give it a five out of ten.

The standard physical hardware was, admittedly, very expensive in the beginning, but everything has been good in terms of ROI. We have seen perhaps a 20% return on our initial investment and if we were to go back in time we would do the same again.

When we negotiated with Cisco for the HyperFlex solution, they gave us a good price because they wanted to break into the market in Portugal for the first time. However, in general, I think it's a very expensive solution. It's a huge amount of money to acquire this kind of infrastructure.

I would give the pricing a rating of eight out of ten.

My main recommendation to others is to do the proper calculations in terms of processor, memory, and disk requirements. This will ensure that you have the correct number of hosts from the beginning, because adding a new host at a later stage may be expensive.

Overall, HyperFlex HX is an excellent solution and we like it a lot, not only because it's easy to apply its resources whenever you need to add extra VMs to your infrastructure, but also because it allows you to manage all these resources in an efficient manner.

I would rate Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series a nine out of ten.