Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

Our primary use of the Cisco HyperFlex HX solution is to run virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX is that it is self-contained. 

Cisco HyperFlex HX is fairly stable. We don't have any problems with it. I would give stability an eight out of ten.

For the scalability of the solution, I would give it an 8 out of10.

The solution's technical support is good. We have had a lot of experiences with them in the past. It's fine. We just had some questions. We didn't know how to do everything. 

We've had a few problems. It's new. Often, we don't know how to solve the issue we're having. The response times are okay.

We were looking for hyperconverged solutions. We already purchased Cisco products for our data center. This was a next-generation device.

The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve.

We used a reseller, SMP, for the deployment.

The other vendors on our shortlist were VMware and Datrium.

On a scale from one to ten, I would grade Cisco HyperFlex HX an eight. If the cost was improved, I would give it a ten.

Make sure to look at a long list of competitors in the hyperconverged sector for cross-reference before purchasing. Look at all the main players.

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.

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. 

It’s a part of a public sector bid we're preparing. The HyperFlex platform has been discontinued. It's mainly used for enterprise-grade applications like databases, CRP systems, and typical enterprise workloads.

It is a one-stop solution. It's easy to get the tool started.

The product doesn’t exist anymore. It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations. That is why the vendor discontinued the tool.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. Five or six customers use the on-premise solution.

The technical support is quite nice. We are Cisco Gold Partners. It’s easy for us to find our way with Cisco.

The tool is easy to set up in general.

We don’t need developers to deploy the product, but we need professional services, including a team of five engineers. We also have an internal team of another six engineers.

It's always a pain to work with Cisco on licensing. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. The product could be cheaper.

I’m an integrator. My organization sells the solution. There’s no point recommending something that has gone out of sale. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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. 

The primary use we have for this product is to act as a server and for storage.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to manage.

Another valuable feature is the fact that you can individually upgrade the specific parts of the product. Compared to other products like SimpliVity, or Nutanix you have to upgrade the whole node if you want to expand memory or storage. In HyperFlex, you can actually upgrade at will. If you want to upgrade your memory cloud, you upgrade it. So that is a big advantage I've seen from any hyper-convergence product. VxRail or Nutanix and products like that are not as flexible and that is the biggest reason we chose this solution.

I think the product can improve dramatically in the area of deduplication. With deduplication as it is, you have 30 or 40% of the storage that can't be used because the deduplication is not efficient enough. I hope they fix that problem.

The stability of the solution has never been a problem. I would say it is excellent.

I think the scalability of the solution is excellent. Because you can upgrade individual pieces without upgrading a whole node. The problem for other solutions is that if you want a hard drive or you want additional storage or you want memory, you have to make a bigger investment in hardware and time. So, scalability's excellent.

Our experience with Cisco support and products is always very good.

Through conferences and other research, we became aware that there were products which would serve our needs better. Previously, we needed a dedicated storage person to do storage, a dedicated BMR (Bare Metal Restore) person to do BMR. Now, one person can do both because you spend a lot less time with either. So that is the reason we looked at hyper-convergence and this product.

The initial setup was very straightforward compared to categorical peers. If you compare it with other products, it's straightforward. But when you consider hyper-convergence itself, it is not straightforward. I am technical and I have technical team, otherwise it might have been hard. But for our cumulative experience and looking at implementing products like Nutanix — or some other similar products — it's straightforward.

We used Cisco themselves as the vendor. They were very good at implementing the solution.

Return on investment is really immediate and substantial. In a traditional EMC storage environment, we needed to assign a full-time person to maintain storage. With this solution, our ROI is allowing one full-time person to maintain more because it is easier. You can say, basically, that you're gaining a full-time person to do something else for the same cost.

My advice about the product is simply that it's not cheap. If you have budget limitations it is best to look elsewhere.

We did consider other products like Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, and another company.

We had EMC VNX storage, BMR and such. Hyper-convergence made more sense. The big thing for us was being able to easily manage the product.

I can safely rate this product as an eight out of ten. This is because it's scalable and you can upgrade it as if you are upgrading a server. In any other solution with hyper-convergence, you can't do that, so you've got to buy a node part to upgrade memory. 

Anyone considering this solution should define their requirements. It's not a solution for everybody. If you're using a lot of storage, hyper-convergence might not be good for you. We don't have a lot of storage, so it is a functional and desirable solution for us. If you have much greater storage needs, it may not be a good solution.

Our workload is very heavy. We always acquire support from the tech engineer from Cisco, and they are always there for assistance and provide us the necessary health and guidance. In our environment, we manage to patch our infrastructure regularly, and we don't want to miss any patches. This sometimes it requires a lot of effort, and sometimes the updates are not recommended, and we have to wait for the recommended version. The patch management can impact us in our scope. This helps us centralize everything to make things easier. 

One of the major features of HX is that you have the replication factor, and you have the option to copy your data - and not just once. You also have the option to copy it twice or even get a third copy. It depends on the RF while deploying the checks. This is one of the great benefits. That way, if there is a major outage and you lose one of the nodes, you still have your data, and the data store is up and running, and your service won't be impacted. This is very beneficial for our company as we own a service that should be up and running 24/7. It's related to one of the government sectors, and it's very critical to have it always up and to avoid any downtime.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

It's stable.

We can easily scale the solution. 

The port could be improved. They have a robo port and can build a cluster with two nodes. This one needs a bit more focus. They need to provide us with more advice or maybe some documentation or some instructions for best practices, so we can leverage it effectively. 

They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands. Right now, if we can't find what we need, we need to raise a ticket or send an email. Sometimes we don't have that time to wait for the ticket or the case to be assigned. We should just have access to information about the CLI and various commands.

I've been using the HX for almost three years.

It's a stable solution. Sometimes we face an issue regarding the hard disk. We might find that it's unhealthy and must be replaced by Cisco. This can be easily monitored. 

It's a scalable solution. 

You can upgrade or add many hard disks so the business can keep continuity and scalability. It's also based on your business scope. We have ten branches. The ten branches are variants between the HX nodes. Some of them have ten hard disks, and some of them do not. Some of them have more. In any case, we find it very simple to scale where needed. 

We have six system administrators working directly with the solution.

I'm not sure if there is a plan to increase usage just yet.  

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up. Once you choose the cluster mode that you want to go through, you can put in all the IPs, and HX will start to build the clusters across the nodes. While it's a little bit complex at the beginning, when you get used to it, it's simple.

We have two people available to maintain the solution once it is deployed. 

We have a partner for support, and they do most of the work. We do a bit ourselves in-house as well. Some of us on the interior team have an HX certification and have strong knowledge of the solution. I'm working to be certified myself right now. 

We have seen an ROI while using this product. 

I'm not aware of the exact costs of the solution. 

We looked at VxRail from Dell and Nutanix. We chose Cisco as we use Cisco a lot in our company.

I would suggest new users read the documentation very well and prepare an action plan based on their design. They have to address all the possibilities and have a rollback plan in case something goes wrong. These points must be addressed. For beginners or some people who don't have this knowledge, they must consult a third party who has this knowledge to ensure they have done it correctly to avoid lengthy troubleshooting or any other issues.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Cisco HyperFlex HX is internal. We use it for internal hyper-converged. I post VMs for internal use and for customers.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the time to deliver a VM takes me five minutes. In comparison, my cloud team's response is a couple of days based on all their overhead policies, procedures, and ticket requests. This is substantial.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is easy to use all across the board. I can do hyper-converged without being a storage guy. That's a big deal.

They should fix the upgrade process. The upgrade process is great. It is seamless 70% of the time, but when it doesn't work, it goes south. Cisco needs to fix some of those upgrade bugs and it will be a perfect solution. That would be good for somebody who doesn't want to spend a lot of time micromanaging the device in production.

It is very stable. I've been running one cluster since 2016 with no outages. I've got two other clusters that have been running flawlessly.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has got great scalability. Right now, they offer a potential scale that is well beyond my network requirements.

Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex.

We weren't using any previous solution. I was trying to redesign how we deployed services and tools to our customers. The only way to do that was with virtualization.  

I needed something like Cisco HyperFlex HX because I'm a network guy. I'm not a server or storage guy. I wasn't the VM guy. I needed something that I could support with very low maintenance and very few hands. Cisco HyperFlex HX has fulfilled that need greatly.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

For the deployment, we consulted with Cisco directly.

HyperFlex and Nutanix were the main two products that I looked at. The reason I eventually chose Cisco was cost and data center footprint. Nutanix was twice the physical footprint in the data center than HyperFlex.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product a solid nine because of the upgrade process. Everything we've been doing with it is blazing a new trail. 

We've been dramatically changing how we deliver the service. Not only am I changing how we deliver the service, but the tools team is changing the platform they're delivering it on too. It's all a new investment. There are not a lot of cost savings today that we can realize.

You can deploy Cisco HyperFlex HX with very little knowledge of UCS, hyper-converged, or storage. There is very little ramp-up time. UCS manager takes a little bit of getting used to. Cisco HyperFlex HX is a solid product. I can't steer people away from it.