Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We deploy these for our customers, we're in the reseller space.

Use cases are typically around data center revolutions, consolidations in virtualization density, and being able to scale both up and out.

On the architectural side of it, there's the single pane of glass. In the hyper-converged, there is that validated design approach of having all of the components which should work together.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is better than most.

The pricing can always be better on everything. 

The interdependencies of each of these functions and the configuration side are something that needs to be carefully architected so that if something isn't working in my memory stick, it doesn't have a cascading waterfall effect through the rest of my operation. The interdependency could be improved so that everything will not be so interrelated.

The initial setup can be a bit complex. 

We've been a partner with Cisco for over 20 years, and, as it pertains to HyperFlex, we probably deployed the first HyperFlex in the Northeast region - and that was probably four years ago. We did it when it first came out.

In terms of stability, it's way more stable than when it first came out. The earlier evolutions of this were like building the plane as we were flying it.

Cisco tech support, as bad as it can be, is better than most.

There's additional complexity around the solution.

In a hyper-converged scenario, the financial outcome is that you need to further align your refresh cycles of your storage, of your compute stack, and of your networking. From the client-side, that can also lead to a little bit of solution lock-in, a slight vendor lock-in.

Before, if I wanted to see maybe if my storage is up, and I'm looking at the time to adopt all-flash SSD or putting NVME in my environment, and updating my either blade centers, or pizza box servers, et cetera, it would all fit together. Even though that there's modularity built into the hyper-converged, there's still a little bit of a tax where you have to overbuy on other resources to provision that you want.

You don't need a huge team to deploy the solution. A deployment team is lightweight. It's two different individuals or maybe three with project management included.

We're a gold partner, one of their leading partners in our area.

Historically, I'm not very much pro-hyper-converge as there's a lot to the market still. What happens is, if it's poorly architected, that if something's screwed up, everything is screwed up. That's the part of the issue with the hyper-converged. You've got it very tightly knit. However, there are still advantages to the separation of failure domains, whether that be your compute, your storage, your memory.

I would take a Cisco Flex approach over a Cisco hyper-converged approach, all day, every day. It's the most widely adopted platform in the world for converged architecture and has a knowledge base that is way larger and has way more experience running. Also, just because you have to update one piece of it doesn't mean you have to update all pieces of it. My honest opinion is to still see what else is in the market to validate your approach to go with an all Cisco solution in the hyper-converged space. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the hosting of VMs.

We were just using standard ESX clusters on UCS flights. Instead, they chose HyperFlex to see if it could replace that solution. 

This is just your standard ESX on blade server type of deployment.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions on the storage side by having one big storage space for hosting VMs. We do not have to provision other ones. That's a positive aspect of it.

I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept.

I don't work day-to-day enough with Cisco HyperFlex to be able to say what would necessarily make it better. Initial integration was tough. 

Our group was just looking for another approach to hosting their various VMs. 

So far, it's been fairly stable.

It seems like the Cisco HyperFlex is very scalable. Our deployment is small. We haven't tested out that aspect of it.

Technical support is good. I don't do day-to-day operations of it, another group does.

The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX was complex, i.e. trying to integrate it into an existing environment. It was more tailored for a brand new deployment, where you're just building it from the ground up. 

We already had an existing system and we're trying to integrate it into it.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate this product a seven. It seems like it would be easy to utilize for a new deployment.

I would prefer that Cisco not try to sell it as something that can integrate into an existing environment. They are beating down on that, but be aware. 

The limitations, whether you're doing a new deployment or trying to integrate it into an existing system, might be tough.

We use it on our customer-facing network management and customer portals. It is run between two resilient data centers and runs very well.

We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers.

• High availability
• Replication

The stability has been really good. We haven't had any issues since it's been in production for the last six to nine months.

Scalability was one of the big selling points. Because we are using HyperFlex, we can add additional compute or storage resources without breaking the model that we have built.

I don't think we have had any issues, but the technical support that we have had has been good

We were using HPE SimpliVity. We knew we needed a high availability, resilient data center architecture. SimpliVity simply did not meet these requirements. This forced us to look around. Cisco had improved massively around HyperFlex. As a Cisco partner, it was a natural choice for us. 

It was fairly straightforward to bring online. We had a bit of complexity to think about how to migrate our legacy infrastructure into Cisco HyperFlex, but this was more of a risk management process for us as a business, as opposed to anything relating to the technology.

We are a Cisco partner. We used ourselves and our professional services for our deployment. I have to say, "They worked great."

We would not have invested if we didn't feel the return was there for our customers.

We were mostly looking between Cisco and HPE.

We are a Cisco partner, so Cisco is a more natural choice for us. Feature-wise, Cisco was a superior product, so it was a simple choice.

Work with Cisco and the Cisco partner. It is all about understanding your requirements. The product works well and supports your business. We recommend it.

We have a remote site. We are developing this site so that we can locally access the VMware environment with the least network bandwidth. We have deployed the ESXi host virtual edition.

It is a complete package. For any kind of on-premises hyper-converged solution, we usually have to separate networks, but Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a complete solution. It has its own network and storage. The storage part is the most valuable feature.

Its price could be better.

I have been using Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series for the last one and a half years.

It is stable. There are no issues.

We have not contacted them regarding Cisco HyperFlex because the setup was straightforward. We have a team in the USA, and they were mostly dealing with any kind of sales-related queries, but for technical support, we have not encountered any problem to engage them.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took around two hours.

Its price is rather fair when compared with other solutions like VxRail, vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity. We got a fair amount of discount from Cisco for Cisco HyperFlex.

It is cost-effective. We have renewed storage till next year, and we have already paid the vendor. When we talk about HyperFlex or any HCI solution, storage is the part where we can reduce a lot of costs. At the current moment, we are already using NetApp storage, which did not allow us to go for a full Cisco HyperFlex setup. We are planning to go to a larger scale next year. Then we will be able to see how cost-effective it really is for us.

I would encourage people to go with this solution. I would rate Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series a seven out of ten because we have not tested all the features so far.

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.

We use it as an application server and for storage.

The feature that we are most interested in is the scalability. When needed, we are able to add more nodes and scale it up further. That is the feature which we sought. All three nodes are similar and maintaining paths is easy.

Our company has various business divisions. One of the business divisions has shifted to a new location. Other divisions will join in the future. We have started a data center for the first division that shifted, and as and when more divisions join, we'll be adding more nodes. That is the reason we see scalability as an important feature.

I would like it to be easier to manage the server, create VMs, and manage the VMs on the client.

As far as the server is performing, everything is good. There have been no problems and no downtime. We haven't been using it a long time but up until now it has been stable.

Our technical support is done through our partner.

We were using more on the VMware side. This is the first time we are using HyperFlex. We had an HPE-based system which we replaced with this. It was HPE Simplivity but it was no good. We did not get good feedback about Simplivity.

The deployment was very fast, they completed it in a couple of days. Cisco ships all the servers pre-installed. It was pretty straightforward. We didn't really have an implementation strategy. It wasn't so complicated.

The deployment only required one person from our side - our server maintenance engineer - and one from the implementation partner.

The initial setup was done by our implementation partner, S.K. International. Initially they struggled a bit and then, finally, they did a good job.

They are maintaining it right now. We may take over after a year. We will have a person to do all the maintenance. We already have a team maintaining the other servers, so maybe we will have them do this too.

Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount.

We have also gone for another setup from Cisco, which we should soon receive, the vGPU. On this second purchase they were not able to give the same discount.

We had various options. We looked at Dell EMC, Nutanix, and others. We also evaluated Simplivity, from HPE, and we finally ended up with HyperFlex.

With Cisco, the entire solution was from the same vendor, whereas with Dell EMC and Simplivity there were different vendors. Our main point was scalability. That's where Cisco scored well, but most important was a good price.

There are around 250 users working on it right now. It is used for our manufacturing solution which collects information and Exchange data. There are other users who are using the storage.

We will expand its use in the future. As far as the compute is concerned, we will be using it to pick up 60 percent of the work. As far as the storage goes, we are only using ten to 15 percent. In the next few years we will expand and in the seventh year we may have to upgrade or replace the server.

We use it in our production environment for some tasks, such as availability, easy scalability, easy setup, and independence from too many solutions put together. We use FlexPod as another one for mutualized infrastructure.

It is easy for one person to manage, and you don't need to have different expert specialists to configure your storage networking, on the server side, power side, etc. 

It is an out-of-the-box solution. It can be used with little to large size equipment and make things work quickly.

Its most valuable features are:

• Its flexibility
• It is a non-stop solution.
• It is an all-in-one solution.
• It is a cost saving solution. 
• When we use it for VDI solutions, it is very easy to deploy and support.

I would like to have an easy solution calculation to plan my infrastructure and complete my licenses. Because as of now, I have to read a lot of materials and documents.

We have been using this solution for about two years and nothing has happened. We have had no downtime yet. I believe it will work perfectly over the long-term.

It is very easy to scale with this solution.

Their tech support is very clear and easy to work with, and we haven't any problem with them.

We evaluated:

• Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs Dell EMC
• Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs NetApp
• Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs AppDynamics.

The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration.

We always deploy all the solutions for our team. Because our market is not as large as in big countries, our partners sometimes do not seek out teams who can deploy difficult solutions. Since our company is one of the biggest in our country, deployments depends on very hard integrations between system. This is too hard for an external company because they would need to take a long time to understand what we need and how we need to deploy it. The easiest way is to have our own team.

Pricing is better if you buy more Cisco products.

Don't afraid to try other solutions. Companies are constantly changing. Sometimes some little companies bring about the perfect solution for other products. You should research everything.

Cisco has a very wide range of products. You can build everything within Cisco products, and it will be easily deployable. The programming language is the same between it and other software and hardware companies.

We are one of the biggest cloud providers in Bangladesh, so we use this service and we are relaying the service to the end customer. We have many multinational companies, ODSMs providers, and banks as our customers, so it's pretty good, knowing that we have a kind of highly-loaded workload.

It's a very robust solution. There are a lot of products on the market you can access, but this is an end-to-end compact solution for the end customer. It's good, and it's a high-end type of product. The workload can handle anything and has an extended capacity. 

The problem is that we always have to keep an eye out for new releases to make sure that the version we're running is up-to-date. The way their infrastructure is updated and evaluated, they are always updating their firmware structure. That is the only challenge we are experiencing, but you have to look for the updates all the time, which is a challenge and everyone's very frustrated at this point.

The cloud world is changing every day. It would be good if they added provisions for activities like micro-services and micro-segmentation. 

We have been using this solution for almost two and a half years. 

It isn't stable so far because the problem is that you have to update your version, and then also update your firmware to the latest development. If you're using an old version of any of them, it makes trouble. That is a challenge we are facing, but it is okay. The solution handled an enterprise where they switch the workload and run it every day, so it is stable in that way.

The solution is scalable. We are using so many clusters, including standard clusters, self-encryption device clusters, and accessories. It is definitely a scalable solution. As a service provider, we have over 80 people using the solution.

I have reached out to technical support so many times. The team is definitely excellent. It's clear they want to be the biggest cloud company in the world, so they're very supportive people. They have a lot of knowledge to share, and I'm happy to work with them.

There are a lot of constants and there's a lot to do on the infrastructure and stories part, so there are different segmentations. Integration of the stories part is okay if you have a knowledge of what the stories require. After the stories part, you also need to reach out to the Hyperflex center version for service to the cloud. If you're using EMC or maybe data updates or other things, it's the kind of thing where you need to understand those first.

For the later parts of the integration, you need to understand what you have because it really gets pretty complex. You have to integrate it with the gen network. It gets a little bit complex when there's micro-segmentation, or an application type of thing. You have to share that stuff with a lot of different segments, so I would say the network setup is pretty difficult and complex.

Initially, we had a system integrator. They are from India and they initially helped us and guided us through it. They were here onsite and they worked with us and shared knowledge about how to do stuff and how to get the services. Initially it was definitely a challenge, but after getting the services and workload and testing so we knew what we needed, we moved into application. From that point we were able to do it on our own.

We have a yearly license. 

I would recommend this product, depending on the context. It depends on what kind of services you want to run and provide.

My company decided on this solution because of the stability, sustainability, and strength of the product. Also, they have so much support, and their people are knowledgeable. When you're having a problem, they will help you to find a solution. Whatever problem you are facing, you are able to solve.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten.