Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We use the solution as a host environment for applications and also for VDI.

The solution is easy to use and to learn. It is well integrated with VMware. 

Additionally, the solution is flexible, we have projects in a few sectors such as the environmental and oil industries. It has been working well overall.

This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable, it has been able to perform all the tasks we have used it for. It is very reliable.

The solution is scalable and it is easy to expand in storage and other areas, such as if you want to increase the nodes it is very simple. We currently have approximately 3000 users using the solution.

We have never had an issue that would need their support.

I have used HPE SimpliVity previously and it had some other features that this solution does not have that are useful.

The initial setup was straightforward, the solution does a lot of the configuration by itself. The installation should take approximately a few hours if you have all the prerequisites in place.

We did the implementation ourselves and we have two network engineers doing the deployments and maintenance of the solution.

We have plans to keep using the solution in the future. We have one standard traditional environment and also hyper-converged with Cisco. We are planning to add more hardware to increase capacity because we are almost at full capacity now. We are going to increase the infrastructure due to the ramping up of operations.

If you want a reliable solution then I would advise choosing this one.

I rate Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten.

It is very scalable. It is also very secure. Cisco's security portfolio is integrated with it, which makes it secure.

It is a platform-based device. Its performance is also fairly good in comparison to any other solution.

If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product.

Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors.

I have been using this solution for the last two years. 

It is stable.

It is scalable.

I don't set it up, but based on the information that I have from my customers, it is not difficult to set it up. It is easy to set up, but it is not easier than a SaaS-based product. Our customers buy only its latest version.

Its price is high. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Nutanix or VMware are cheaper products, and they provide almost the same functionality. Its price is a big road blocker when we are working with an end customer, and Nutanix and VMware are in competition. If they can reduce its price, it is actually a better choice for customers.

The OEMs from Nutanix, VMware, and Cisco have more or less the same features and functionality. The only thing that is missing in this solution is that it doesn't have a SaaS-based version. I would definitely recommend this solution for customers who are looking for an appliance-based product. Cisco HyperFlex is the best appliance-based product. It is better than Nutanix, even though Nutanix is more cost-effective than Cisco.

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

Our primary use case of this solution is for VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, for our community college.

It ultimately provides a virtual desktop so that we can backup user data a lot more easily. In the past, it was all a straight desktop computer so if your desktop dies, all your data would die as well.

In terms of it being flexible for various projects, it does seem to lend itself to other applications, for example, our VMware, as well as servers that we may want to bring up under the HyperFlex solution so we may go in that direction sometime in the future.

It has the potential of actually being a six million dollar impact to the college because it replaces people's computers. Until we start to transfer users over to it we really won't know how much of that six million dollars is savings for us.

I don't know if it's lowered the deployment time per se because we really haven't gotten to the point where we added shelves or added servers to it. We're expecting for that to be a simple process given what Cisco claims it will do. Ultimately we're expecting no downtime for that.

The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system. It saves money in the long-run. 

We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users.

The stability is great but ultimately we've noticed the updates and upgrades take a bit of an impact on the solution. More so, having to reboot the solution and having to restart it. While it is stable, rebooting it for updates isn't always convenient. Ultimately, just like any organization, we would do that on off hours whether it be weekends, nights, or whatnot. But that costs money because you have to have staff on weekends, nights and whatever overtime they have to account for.

Scalability is just as they predicted. It combined the frontend servers with the backend storage. While it is a little cumbersome to learn, it is scalable to be able to add more shelves if I need more memory or additional servers very easily. It does scale nicely.

I'm pretty neutral about technical support right now given that we're still setting up the solution to some degree. The support is great, as long as there is a maintenance contract in place. But because the overall solution is still rather new, using knowledge base or just generic knowledge base out on the internet is not as prevalent as I would like.

We are a Dell shop. We looked at HP but ultimately because of the features that Cisco brought with the HyperFlex solution, we felt that that was a superior product to everyone else.

The initial setup was straightforward. We simply wanted to understand how the two worked together given that the claim is that it's supposed to be easy to combine both storage and servers.

We used a consultant for the deployment that Cisco suggested. Because the solution is rather new to us the scenario was pleasant. They knew what they were doing but I felt like the knowledge transfer could have been a lot better.

I would rate it a high eight or nine out of ten because of the features and functions that it comes with that the competitors really can't do just yet. The advantage I think so far has been that Cisco developed the entire solution from scratch as opposed to other solution providers like HP and Dell who are still trying to reinvent existing solutions.

I think it's a viable solution if you have a need to cut down on your overall implementation costs on hardware. This does a good job of combining both software and hardware.

Our primary use case for the product is for the data center. We are hosting all of the servers and building infrastructure.

Cisco HyperFlex is helping us to put everything in centrally so that we can manage in one place. 

That's the whole reason why we got the solution, so that we can have better integration with all of our product applications.

We are still exploring Cisco HyperFlex. We have just deployed it. It's all automation. We want to automate everything. That's the reason why we bought it. 

One problem is that whenever we want to do something on VMware, you are dependent on HyperFlex. With everything now, you have to look into HyperFlex. 

You cannot just apply the VSXi updates. You are dependent on Cisco HyperFlex for metric services, analytics, and everything else. I don't like that dependency.

Stability is good so far, but there is a lot of learning. A lot of things are dependent on VMs. There are controlled VMs and you have to always make sure to keep those VMs up and running.

There is a lot of learning involved with ACI. That's huge. The technology which goes around HyperFlex, you have to learn, i.e. ACI, HyperFlex, VMware, etc.

One thing I like about this product is it is more scalable and fast, i.e. the disks and everything. We can extend our data center to some other places.

Technical support is fairly good. I have been able to get through to the right person. It took me a while, but it was not something very urgent. I didn't think it was much trouble.

We used a reseller called DIG. It was good. I was not part of that.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the product an eight. It's a great data center tool. I look at the weight of the costs too.

None of the products is 100% correct. We just deployed the Cisco HyperFlex. We have to see how it goes. We are also in the cloud. You have to keep looking for that option as it saves a lot on hardware and power consumption

We are still migrating all our old infrastructure, which is on C7000. We are doing that right now. Once that is done, I'll be able to get some metrics. Every company is different.

I'm a solution architect and I use it to help my clients to achieve better performance in VDI solutions, in clusters, in database consolidation. The solution addresses these kinds of scenarios.

We have a large e-commerce client in Brazil. The company name is Sinova. This company has a lot of e-commerce portals. Every Black Friday in Brazil, before the HyperFlex implementation, the site would go down. The portals didn't have the performance ability to achieve the goals. After the implementation of Cisco HyperFlex, we added a lot of performance to these portals. We no longer have problems when high demand occurs.

Every year, we add one or two nodes to Sinova's web services clusters. The client uses the servers to support web servers for e-commerce.

I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform. I love this kind of visual.

It is a great platform because it's easy to use. It's easy to put a business inside this box. It's so practical.

Cisco has to continue improve the management tools to provide a better command line interface with more functions. That would be better for administration.

The stability is very good. I have never seen problems with the clusters or any component of the solution. It's very stable.

In terms of scalability, it is the best among all the competitors in the data center-hyperconverged world. We can add nodes to improve the compute of a cluster. We can add nodes to increase storage. We can grow a cluster up to 32 nodes.

The biggest that I have been involved in implementing was five nodes.

The initial setup depends on the business context. All the implementations that I participate in are a little bit complex. It's hard to integrate the platform with the client's data center network. The clients don't have the correct view for best implementing this solution. We need to help them understand, to provide the prerequisites. This is a little bit complex.

A deployment takes between three days and a week. A week is a good amount of time to understand, to implement it, to document it, and to help the clients understand it.

Our implementation strategy first requires us to write a good summary of the client's requirements so they will be using HyperFlex correctly. We need to understand the requirements. With this site survey, we can design the environment.

For a standard size of clusters with three nodes, two analysts is more than enough to implement the solution. After it's deployed and configured, one good analyst is needed to maintain it.

This kind of solution adds a lot of value because it helps the IT department to align with the business' view. We can participate, we can add value to the business because we do implementations faster and we can add compute and storage, many kinds of variables to the environment, very quickly and easily.

Here in Brazil, our point of view about the cost to implement or buy this kind of solution is that it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution. For me, this is the most negative point of the Cisco solution: the price and the licensing costs.

I have knowledge of VxRail from Dell EMC. I have also read about solutions from Hitachi and Super Micro. I haven't used them though.

To me, the key difference for me between the Dell infrastructure and Cisco infrastructure is that Cisco is more integrated. The hardware and software work the way I want them to.

Collect all the information about the environment to determine the prerequisites, understand the business, and understand the value of infrastructure solutions. 

We are a small partner. We have four clients right now that use the Cisco HyperFlex solution.

I would rate HyperFlex at ten out of ten.

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.

We use the solution to combine and migrate regular servers to a hyper-converged infrastructure.

The solution works faster and is easy to use than any regular system. Also, its fabric interconnect provides flexibility for the system to scale up.

The solution's most valuable feature is the high availability of the system.

The solution's price could be affordable.

We have been using the solution for around two years.

I rate the solution's stability as a ten.

We have 1000 users of the solution in our organization. We plan to increase the usage as well.

I rate its scalability as an eight.

The solution's technical support is excellent.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. You have to follow the configuration guide.

The solution is highly priced compared to other vendors.

I recommend it to others and rate it as a ten.

We use this solution as Active-Active and to host some of our applications. Compared to Nutanix, it is not as good. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is not a matured HCI solution. If something goes wrong with Nutanix, we use Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, so we at least have half of our systems running. It is helpful as a backup solution.

A lot needs to be improved. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good. Features are missing, and it does not support VMware Seven.

We have been using this solution for about three years, and I believe we are using version 4.5. It is deployed on-premises.

It is not a stable solution.

We have about 10,000 users. Maintenance is okay, but the hardware failure is too much, and sometimes memory is lost.

The support is okay but unprofessional.

The initial setup was complicated, and we had to struggle a lot. The switches, such as WAN switches, LAN switches, Nexus, and all those areas, are perfect. But when it comes to HCI, it is not a good solution. So we completed deployment with Cisco support.

I rate this solution a four out of ten.