Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We are using this product for our on-premises terminal operating system.

The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites.

Having a small infrastructure that includes Nexus and fabric interconnects is costly, which is something that should be improved.

I have been working with Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series for between two and three years.

This is a stable product.

This solution is scalable, although only the IT staff uses it. Normal users don't rely on this product. We are deploying it for all of the terminals but it is not clear whether we will expand our usage because we are using different products, as well.

The Cisco technical support is fine. We haven't had any problems.

I would rate the technical support a three or four out of five.

Neutral

I have also used Cisco UCS. This product is okay; it is not much different but provides some automation functionality. For example, automatic deployment.

I have not used any other hyperconverged solutions.

The initial setup is easy. It takes a long time to install and configure the prerequisites but testing it is quick enough. That takes one or two hours.

I would rate this initial setup a three or four out of five.

We deployed this product in-house.

We have a centralized team for technical support and the deployment of products, such as this one. The team is not dedicated to HyperFlex.

There is a recurring cost for the VMware license and the HyperFlex licenses.

As we are still evaluating this product, I am not at the stage where I can recommend it to others. We are evaluating and considering the impact of the recurring cost.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The primary use case is for non-production purposes like development, testing, etc.

The database and deduplication features are what I like the most. On a storage level, the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is managed well. These features can be used for specific applications, such as the Oracle database, or general purposes.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could be improved by reducing the number of nodes. Currently, the architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts. For example, if I need around 200 servers with a requirement of TB of storage, I would need 200 clusters, which can be quite cumbersome.

Other solutions like Dell and Nutanix have a single combined unit that includes computing, memory, and storage, which can reduce the number of nodes required and also reduce licensing and power consumption.

Therefore, I suggest improving the architecture of the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series by combining computing, memory, and storage into a single unit, making it more efficient and easier to manage. It will also reduce the number of nodes required and licensing costs and help to reduce power consumption.

I would like to see improved internal integration capabilities in the next release. Currently, it is constrained only to VMware only. So, there is no integration part of the RAC or IEL or anything, and it isn't easy to manage it. If I want to hold another partner, then that part will not be possible. So, you have to manage that particular integration.

Another feature could be in terms of memory usage.

I have been using this solution for the last five years. We are using the latest version.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I would rate scalability a six out of ten. It has some issues with scalability.

The customer service guy supported me well.

Positive

We had a physical environment with Cisco, and virtualization began in that environment. We were using a Dell environment where all the personal data was standalone with the servers.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment was straightforward and took around a month due to the 58 nodes. Once the drive was implemented, the deployment was completed. While they are not direct users of the solution, the infrastructure supports over 1000 users in our IT department. However, maintenance requires a team because hardware issues might need to be addressed. There are four to five people responsible for maintenance.

I have a yearly subscription.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. It may require a significant initial investment to set up the infrastructure.

Our primary use case of HyperFlex is for storage. We are customers of Cisco. 

The integration to the network is a great thing. It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network which is Cisco's new network topology. It improves the accessibility of the data on HyperFlex, on their storage. It's similar to V-Storage on VMware and it integrates very well with the network.

I'd like to see easier integration with other vendors. For example, it wasn't that easy to integrate with VMware initially but eventually it worked. Ideally, I'd like to see the option of integrating with those devices on cloud, to use storage from our on-prem in a bucket in the cloud. We haven't yet seen any documentation regarding that. We need to find a way to share resources between on-prem and cloud.

We've had this solution implemented for five years. 

Initially, HyperFlex wasn't so stable but from the last update, it's been very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

The initial setup is not so straightforward, but as soon as it's set up, it's easy to integrate with other things. We generally deploy in-house with some assistance from Cisco. When we initially implemented, the deployment took a while because it was new to us, and new to the market. In particular, the integration to VMware wasn't easy, but since then, it has been very smooth. The entire company uses this solution.

I would recommend this product, I think it's a good device to use. It's not for medium-sized businesses, more for enterprise-level. The integration with VMware is fairly easy and smooth nowadays; it's fairly stable and scalable. It's a good product to try out. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

This solution is used for branch office servers.

Instead of having to go to multiple vendors to deploy a solution, it's just one place where we have everything that we need to set up and go.

The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers.

Having this solution even easier to manage would be nice.

The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running. I would like to have less clicking to deploy it, where it is ready to go out of the box with a default build. That would make things a little faster.

This solution was not stable when we originally implemented it. However, over the last eighteen months or so, the updates have made it stable and actually usable for us.

It definitely looks like it keeps scaling. We're not doing huge deployments of it, but it looks like it's easy to keep adding on to what we have.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

The initial setup was complex, but it was done more than eighteen months ago in the old form of things. It was a little harder than it is now.

We handle the implementation and deployment in-house.

We currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet.

We purchased both this solution and one from Nutanix to compare them.

This solution allows us to get up and running a lot faster than before. Instead of it being multiple days of cabling, multiple solutions, and getting the servers online, it now generally takes one full day to get it up and ready to go.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Cisco HyperFlex for two reasons:

1. At one data center, it's used as our primary virtualization and storage platform. 
2. At our other data center, it's used for VDI.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series has improved our organization. 

On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it's self-contained. At the data center, everything is in the virtualized section. It was easier to put that in there than build it, i.e. buy a stand, buy the computers, and get it all integrated with networking. 

With hyper-scale, we're able to go in very quickly and be able to get it up online.

Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly.

The initial implementation workflow could be improved. There's a lot of information you need to gather. At the time we deployed it, approximately a year and a half ago, that there was a lot of information that we needed to gather. It wasn't explicitly called out to in the workflow as you were going through the screens. 

We had to know what we were doing. We read a lot of documentation to get all of that information.

Stability is great. I found that with Cisco hardware in general, i.e. anything on the UCS or HyperFlex side.

The scalability is very good. Thus far, I haven't had to scale it out. In talking with my engineer, I'm very comfortable that when the time comes, we will be able to.

The technical support has been exceptional. We had some minor issues implementing it the first time. They were able to come in and help us out. We were up and running very quickly.

With any new technology, you hope that it is straightforward, but you expect some complexity. That is also true for HyperFlex when it was first implemented. 

We were in between revisions and had some minor challenges. We overcame them very quickly.

When we were deploying it, it was between two revisions. It was between HyperFlex 2.5 and 3.0. There were some steps in the 3.0 version that weren't spelled out. 

The engineers came in and helped us with that and we were able to overcome those challenges.

We did not use a vendor team. We took some courses through Cisco. We had our engineers come out and assist us.

We haven't seen a specific ROI. We've seen some across the board in separate environments for the data center and the VDI environment. 

We haven't seen a return on the investment but the performance is something that we are very happy with overall.

It's roughly $30,000 per HyperFkex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year.

We looked at a couple of different types of solutions. Nutanix was the leading competitor with HyperFlex. We went with Cisco because of their years of experience with HyperFlex and the support we had previously.

It was very straightforward using the technology platform. We were comfortable with it. In the VDI environment, we're a Cisco shop and HyperFlex did fit the need well.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product with an eight. Like any new product, it's constantly evolving. The evolution of the HyperFlex solution is a challenge.

I would recommend looking at the options when you go to implement it. Cisco's HyperFlex has a lot of different flavors. Make sure you pick the flavor for your specific implementation. 

VDI has a different set of requirements than a standard hypervisor environment. Know what your end state is going to be, then pick the equipment behind the scenes that fit your needs.

Our use case was to set up a new VDI farm.

If you set up a cluster and then you decide a bit later on to split that resource into several smaller clusters, that's where UCS comes in and eases that operation better than anyone else that I've worked with. It provides better capacity utilization and a faster time to delivery. The cluster-splitting took about two hours while before, it took about four days. That's a considerable time savings in down-scaling and cluster spitting.

There are two most valuable features in HyperFlex:

• The UCS, which is by far the best management tool there is on the market, regardless of vendor. It's the only tool I see that gives you the opportunity to size and scale all the assets and capacity you have in your data center, from a unified view.
• That Cisco provides the ability to configure BIOS, something that no one else can do, on a remote basis. That's really helpful sometimes. The bus-snooping alteration tool for BIOS is fantastic. That's one of the game-changing features that Cisco alone has at this point.

In addition, the density, how much performance you can pack into the form factor, that is most impressive for me.

Finally, there's no high learning curve. It's very easy. Sure, you should have some experience, of course. But it's not that hard to get familiar with the user interface and how to manage and operate it.

It's extremely stable.

The scalability is fantastic; I'm close to saying matchless. I've forgotten how many physical nodes were involved, but it was a substantial installation. Really large. It had the capacity to host 16,000 concurrent users. That's pretty sizable.

I haven't experienced Cisco tech support in person, since it all went smoothly. We didn't have any problems.

They were using Dell EMC VxRail. They didn't switch, really. Cisco's presence just started to increase.

I found the setup to be relatively straightforward, but I have some 20 years in the business, so that could be a factor.

The deployment took two days. The company is a VMware house, so all things come to VMware. So maybe that eased things too. But you have to have Cisco-Certified engineers mounting the stuff.

The implementation of HyperFlex required six people, including the server manager, me, and two guys from Tech Mahindra taking care of the VMware parts. And there were two Cisco-Certified engineers from a big partner in this region, named Atea.

They missed some tables in the delivery and that took us an extra day. But I don't think that's mandatory procedure. Overall, the implementation went very smoothly.

For maintenance it takes four people on a day-to-day basis with specified, divided roles. including some taking care of the VMware parts while I take care of the VDI-specific features. I would consider it a high-maintenance solution. It's not that it takes full-time support, not from that perspective, but you have to be pretty well skilled in software, setting up profiles, etc. That's not Cisco-specific.

I have had a really good and long experience with Atea as a partner. 

This was my first acquaintance, in person, with Tech Mahindra and that was pretty interesting. You have to be somewhat aware of the caste system. It eases your dialogue.

ROI can be found in down-scaling time, which includes cluster-splitting, and the overall management, with the ease of UCS, compared to any other tool in that space.

It's hard to say there's a financial value since they're quite expensive. It's also a matter of OpEx and CapEx. Perhaps you pay up a little bit more, but to OpEx and CapEx will be lowered since the solution lasts forever and is easier to manage.

They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive."

We compared two quotes. The other quote was from another big OEM, which is very closely tied to VMware. I was assigned to do that comparison since I have somewhat of a reputation as being good in sizing up the component base. I soon found out that the Cisco solution provided much higher density for the form factor than the other. Also, the server manager got a good feeling about the UCS by itself and the density. They were really good staff to work with and they have a high presence in the region. And they're really great in costumer care.

I know Cisco is working pretty hard to become a top player in the AI space. But I don't think Cisco has many competitors. There is Dell EMC and maybe Supermicro, which is always first on the market with all things new. Cisco is definitely one of the top three vendors.

Amulet Hotkey has some really nice products out there too. It's truly expensive if you want to go full frontal with everything that they offer. On the other hand, you can get there with almost the same, extremely high security level with Cisco products too.

Look at the manageability. Do a serious comparison of management tools. That's strong advice because it can be really expensive too if you have to implement a third-party management tool.

In terms of extent of use, Cisco systems make up about 30 percent of the overall system, but it was definitely the plan to increase Cisco systems within the data center, meaning HyperFlex, because of the form factor and the density of it.

We are partners and integrators of HyperFlex and I am a company Deputy Operative Director of IT.

HyperFlex has benefited us because there are no additional storage requirements and it requires less effort from the server and services in general. 

This solution offers very good data protection and also provides system uptime availability more effectively than the majority of other servers. It can calculate the multiple failures that give better uptime on the nodes. It provides good performance. HyperFlex has great scalability opportunity. 

Every node has a storage controller VM that checks identity and I think that should be eliminated in order to optimize the resource utilized. I'd like to see the ability to integrate with HPE because SimpliVity has some backup-live features which are useful for us. Finally, some improvement to the documentation would be helpful. Expecting some improvements in restore point and failover mechanism. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

Cisco HyperFlex is stable. We faced some issues because it has single dependency on the caching disk, and when that goes down it all goes down. It has only happened once. That aside, it's a stellar solution.

The solution is robustly scalable

The customer support is very good. 

Positive

The implementation isn't too complex but there are some requirements, including pre-deployment which requires a lot of documentation and security such as security management, secured data, VM and the like. We used a local partner to assist with deployment. We have a team of six that were involved in the implementation and with data center maintenance.

We partnered with a SI team and our in-house team also worked equally.  

Organization can achieve a good value of ROI. It depends on organization to organization and also based on purposes. 

We have a three-year license with Cisco and it's a reasonable price. 

We had previously used converged networks and when we decided to move to a hyper-converged infrastructure we evaluated several solutions including Dell EMC and HPE SimpliVity. We checked several criteria including financial, features, technical issues, and availability. We found that the HyperFlex performance gave us added benefits so we went with that.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We are consultants, and we set up this product for our customers.

I like Cisco Intersight.

The price could be better. I think it's more expensive than VxRail. In the next release, I would like to see a better level of protection and availability with six clients.

I have been working with Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series for about two months.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a stable solution.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a scalable solution. We have five or six people working on this solution.

Technical support is good.

I used to work with traditional solutions such as the UCS-C220 product.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is expensive. It's a standard license, and we pay for it yearly. I think we pay about 700.

VxRail is cheaper, more flexible than HyperFlex, and easy to back up. Most customers see that VxRail is more affordable, so why should I go with HyperFlex?

I will tell potential users that I think it's a good product. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight.