Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We are a solution provider and Cisco HyperFlex is one of the products that we propose to our customers. This product is used for hyper-convergence in IT transformation and can be used for very heavy workloads such as VDIs or HAP HANA.

The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the fabric interconnect.

The physical switches are more reliable than the virtual machines.

using a virtual machine to manage the cluster, needs lots of pre-configuration & validation steps, as well may lead to cluster fail in case of the fail / corruption of the VM (unless you manage to have a valid backup to restore, with a valid cluster restoration plan), 

despite the managing of the Cisco Hyperflex, it comes almost preloaded & stand ready for deploying, as well in redundant architecture, which reflect a solid base for managing & reliability deployment. 

They need to make many improvements to this solution but the most important area is the compression. Most customers are concerned with the compression for a specific workload, and then maintaining it. The performance and compression vary depending on the type of workload; for example with SAS HANA, Cisco forces compression and that affects performance very badly. At the least, the customer should have the option to choose what types of workload should be affected by the data reduction functionality.

The second point is that they need to work on the erasure code. Cisco doesn't support erasure code, even over flash. If they fix this then they will only waste 25%. With replication and mirroring, it uses 100% of the allocated capacity. This means that Cisco needs to work on the architecture. I have conducted many PoCs and it is a problem that they need to work on.

Cisco offers a single cache drive cluster, whereas VxRail offers up to four cache disks per drive. When the cache disk fails in Cisco, the whole node fails, and the workload goes down. But when it comes to VxRail, if a cache disk files then only the node fails and the workload remains up and running. This is an area that Cisco needs to work on. Essentially, they have to raise the number of cache disks that can be included in a single node.

We have been working with Cisco HyperFlex for the past four years.

This is a reliable solution

This product is quite scalable.

Our usage of this product may increase but it is up to the customer. For example, when a customer is loyal to Cisco, they will implement HyperFlex. On the other hand, if it's a customer with a hyper-converged infrastructure then they will definitely implement VxRail.

Technical support from Cisco is responsive and depending on the problem, a hardware replacement is offered 24/7, which is good.

I have experience with similar products from other vendors.

HyperFlex is a very good solution, although not compared to Dell EMC VxRail. Both of them have many good features, although VxRail is better and yet, Cisco is more expensive.

If you consider my customers to be a community, 70% of them have VxRail and 30% of them have HyperFlex.

The initial setup is straightforward. The length of deployment depends on the number of channels but for between four and five nodes, it takes approximately two weeks.

This is an expensive solution, although Cisco will offer it free of charge when there is a large networking opportunity that arises. The licensing is perpetual and the only thing that you may need to pay for on a monthly basis is if you're going to use their cloud-based management features. This requires a subscription.

Cisco offers the on-cloud management system for HyperFlex but most of our customers that are using a hyper-converged infrastructure prefer to build their own, private cloud. In most cases, they have this solution installed on-premises.

Cisco HyperFlex is a product that I can recommend, although VxRail is my first choice. Depending on the customer, their environment, and history with Cisco, I will recommend one of these products over the other.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

A client typically uses the solution for the VDI critical application and for the containerization as well. It's a critical application and he X location and the hybrid or multi cloud.

The solution is easy to deploy as they're based on ECS. We buy an ECS Manager so that we can scale out easily. We can also integrate with external storage. We can also scale for computing or storage only.

The product is quite stable.

It's very easy to use and quite a mature product.

As a fairly mature product, I can't think of any features that are lacking per se. 

The pricing is pretty expensive.

Right now they are coming into the public cloud, we want to be seeing HyperFlex integration with public clouds such as AWS, Azure or Google. 

I need to see the feature more use cases for the backup and restore functionalities or how  we can expand the cluster to the public cloud.

I've been using the solution since about 2018. It's been about two years or so. It hasn't been too long.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very good.

We do plan to continue using the product and expanding it as needed. 

Cisco is better for enterprise-level organizations.

Cisco has great technical support. We're quite satisfied with their level of service. Cisco does offer full support for the product, which is quite helpful. They have a good amount of knowledge on their product and they are very good at sharing the information and insights they have. 

However, in comparison, Nutanix technical support is better in that they are not only knowledgeable but responsive as well.

As partners, we use a variety of solutions such as Nutanix, Cisco HyperFlex, and NetApp HCI. We don't for example, have partnerships with HPE or SimpliVity.

If you were comparing Cisco, to, for example, Nutanix, Cisco is more expensive.

The initial setup is not too complex. The installation is pretty easy as the HyperFlex has a deployment engine. We can just follow the wizard and go over everything step-by-step. Cisco has guidelines about the installation in the portal which makes it very convenient to get the insights you need.

The deployment is very fast and takes typically under one hour.

The solution can be pretty expensive. It's not the cheapest option on the market.

My role in the company is pre-sales. We offer this solution to our clients. As a partner, we don't use Cisco HyperFlex, but we propose HyperFlex for the customer.

For the deployment, we can deploy for the DC and DRC side, for the synchronous replication, and also for the stress cluster, we can also deploy for the X location as the HyperFlex has a HyperFex extraction for the X location.

I'm in Indonesia, and in this particular country/region, this solution isn't really used very widely. Nutanix is more famous in Indonesia, as it can be used by the SMB customer or small customers up to enterprises. Most hyper-converged solutions that are used in Indonesia are Nutanix.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations, however, only if it made sense and fit their company's needs.

Overall, I would rate the product eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for data storage for the network.

Integration to third-parties is the most valuable feature. 

Scalability and performance are good. 

Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any. 

We knew we needed to switch solutions because we needed a solution with good performance, scanning, and an overall new and innovative solution. 

We had some hardware problems at the beginning of the initial setup but after that was resolved the setup was straightforward. 

We implemented through an integrator and had a great experience with them. 

The ROI we have seen from the high performance that has saved us time and money.

We also looked at Nutanix. We ended up going with Cisco because our whole network is based on Cisco. 

I would give this solution a seven out of ten because it's still new and I still haven't practiced a lot with it but I have had a good experience until now. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to sit with your integrator, discuss the different products, comply with the competitors, and you will get your desired results.

Our primary use case of this solution is for data center virtualization.

There's high commodity stuff but nothing is very useful inside. The automation is a valuable feature, it's interesting. 

Mostly documentation needs to be improved, we need strong documentation. We also want to not need to open a tech case every time we need to troubleshoot. Stability and storage need to be improved. 

Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. We need a tech engineer for every call. 

Scalability was cool on the marketing site but the two node clusters crashed. I'm not willing to build large scale infrastructure with this product because it's not stable enough.

Technical support is good but we need it for every piece we do. For every change, we need technical support. They are quick to respond and help us solve the issue. 

We switched solutions because the market drives us, mostly Cisco drives us. They have high goals. Normally, we build up a classic converged infrastructure but now Cisco wanted us to deploy hyperconverged.

The initial setup is very complex. 

We are partners so we integrate it ourselves. 

We did not look at other solutions. We only focus on Cisco. We love Cisco and hopefully,  HyperFlex will become a better product. 

I would rate it a four out of ten. I would advise someone considering this solution to be careful. 

The primary use case is for our customer who was moving from classical storage and computing to the new HyperFlex system.

It saves space for data centers, which is good.

Everything is in one device: computing, storage, and networking.

It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable. However, that is okay.

It is very scalable. It is also easy to scan.

I had some issues that I had to solve myself because of the technical support.

The initial setup is very complex because there were some issues. It is not clear to how set up this solution.

I did the implementation myself.

Involve Cisco in the beginning, as they will give you good advice about setting up the product.

While it has a lot of things to improve, it is a good solution.

It is an acceptable storage solution.

It simplifies management. I am sure we have not scratched its limit, but it helps us simplify everything well.

The most valuable feature is to simplify management. We can lower the need for people to work on the storage itself. 

I would like to see the capacity to choose the replications, RFS sectors to all machines, not only on the cluster. Additionally, the solution should provide more detailed documentation.

There are no problems with the stability of the solution.

It is a good, scalable solution.

We had to use technical support once. They were great. 

It is really straightforward. It was not complex. 

I think we are always looking for a vendor that is credible and solves our needs within the solution. This product answers those criteria. The vendor was credible and helpful.

We looked at VMware. 

When considering this product, evaluate it carefully. Note whether the environment is best for the solution.  

Our primary use case is for the distributed computing system in several data centers. 

It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time.  

The flexibility and scalability are the most valuable features. 

They should have more blade options and more configuration flexibility. Also, the price is expensive. It should be cheaper but it is worth the price. 

It's very stable. 

The scalability is one of its main features.

Technical support is very good. 

We switched because we wanted more flexibility, more features and because the global PoC price is better. 

The initial setup was complex because our engineers had some problems with putting it into production but it was fine after they solved the issue.   

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The features that it has are balanced with customer's needs and the price. In order to make it a ten, they should lower the cost.

I would advise someone considering this solution to explore all of the feature options. The solution's value is in its features. 

Our primary use case is to reduce our hardware storage and to make it virtual so we use vSAN and HyperFlex.

The most valuable features are scalability and the easy operation - if it works. You can configure everything from just one window.

They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out. 

In terms of the stability, we can't get it to work. We have one or two VMs online but nothing we could say to get an overview of it.

In terms of scalability, we can add servers, storage servers or computing servers, and we're much more flexible with block-based storage.

We had one other block-based storage just run out of support and service so we thought we'd go with migration. We have a dual-vendor concept and so we wanted to go with vSAN and something else in storage so we chose HyperFlex.

The setup is pretty much is straightforward. The issue is that it doesn't work afterwards.

We integrated directly through Cisco. 

I would rate this solution a three out of ten. I would advise someone considering this solution not to spread it over two data centers.