Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

This is an on-premises enterprise solution that is primarily used for Microsoft, Linux, and Oracle workloads which require intensive computing for hosting/running clustered and standalone applications.

The solution is very reliable in comparison to the other brands. Additionally, the uptime is very good, and they ensure 99.9% of uptime.

The configuration could be simplified as the initial setup process is complex.

We have been using this solution for eight years for multi-organizations.

The scalability is very portable and swappable. So we can add and expand resources easily. Dozens of people are using the solution in our organization, and six are responsible for managing the infrastructure as administrators.

We have had experience with the customer service and support team multiple times when there is a hardware failure, and we requested an RMA for the replacement.

The initial setup is difficult as it is a Unified Computing System, and expertise is required to configure it. Implementation normally takes more than two hours to initialize a new blade, or DC server and initialize a new chassis. However, this solution requires days because the cable installation, uplink planning, deployment, and everything is included. So we need to create a complete project plan for the technical side to deploy this equipment.

It is expensive, which is why limited customers utilize it. However, it is enterprise-class, reliable, stable, and fast. In the past eight years, I have never had any bad experiences with Cisco UCS or faced any outages.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is a tricky piece of equipment with state-of-the-art technology, reliable parts, good stability, and robust features. When you need to compute, it will provide you with speed. However, the solution can be improved by simplifying the configuration.

The most valuable feature that the B-Series has is related to the structure and architecture of the solution because in these solutions, you are using fabric interconnect as an interconnect device. The beauty of fabric interconnect is that it can work as in-house mode.

Fabric interconnect is the main component in the UCS solution. Fabric interconnect can act as two modes. One is in-house mode, and the other one is switching mode. The recommended one is in-house mode. When it works in in-house mode, it means that it won't process any storage, like flagging things, zoning, etc. It won't process Spanning Tree Protocol either. It will just proxy everything to the higher switch.

For example, if you have storage network traffic, the fabric interconnect won't process your flagging. It will make a proxy, and send it to your NPIV storage switch. It acts literally as in-house, and that makes the solution and architecture very easy, convenient, and scalable.

The other important feature is the switch technology that Cisco uses on their chassis. It's not like those of other brands. The beauty of Cisco is that with traffic interconnect, your network and storage won't come down to the chassis level.

It will stop at the fabric interconnect, and the traffic between the fabric interconnect and the chassis acts very similar to the fixed technology that Cisco uses between 2K and 5K. This means that the same architecture and the same technology that we use between 2K and 5K is used between the fabric interconnect and the IO module that's used at the back of the chassis.

This means that when you are using the IOM input/output module, the IOM module on the back of the chassis will not be like a regular switchboard. It will be just IO. So, this means that it is scalable. You can add as many chassis as you want to this whole solution, and you can remove them. You can move one chassis to another chassis. You can move one server from chassis one to chassis eight or chassis seven. You can have a lot of clusters. You can have a lot of failovers over the whole package.

Recently, with the new chassis, UCS X-Series, that Cisco recently introduced to the market, it is much more scalable.

The license is expensive.

Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.

It's very stable.

Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers. It's one of the most scalable solutions in the whole world.

The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at ten.

We use Cisco UCS B-Series as a central computing environment.

The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment. We have a virtual network interface, which means that we can easily reconfigure the machines according to our needs.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than ten years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a scalable solution with a fairly advanced environment that can scale easily. It is not cheap, but it provides the ability to scale up in terms of computing, networking, and memory. Around 2,000 people are using the solution as our central computing. In terms of management, we're a small team of ten people working with the solution. The solution is being used daily in our organization.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team takes some time to resolve our problems. It took them some time to ship us a spare part when we had a problem. For a big organization like Cisco, technical support is not straightforward and could be better.

Neutral

We previously used HPE and Cisco. We switched to Cisco UCS B-Series because we learned to trust Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series was a very stable and good solution. When we bought it last time, we managed to use it for many years.

The solution’s initial setup wasn’t easy.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. The solution was deployed by two people in a few days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a four out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is part of our VMware environment. The Unified Architecture is one of the unique features of the solution that is very usable for us. With the feature, we can immediately understand that we need to configure a separate environment and easily configure networking to allow us to distribute the environment.

The solution is deployed on-premises, but it's managed by the cloud environment. The solution’s maintenance is done by one person. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The UCS Manager, UCS Blades including chassis, and Main Data Centre Virtualization Physical Infrastructure on VMware between sites act as our critical and secure data center environment.

This solution is reliable, expandable, agile, manageable, and scales easily, allowing us to focus on using UCS Manager. We are now expanding the Cisco Hyperconverged solution embedded with the UCS manager.

This is the plus to expand the reliability, expandability, redundancy, and availability of our data center infrastructure environment.

This host-provisioning solution gives us peace of mind, SLA level, and ease of management from the operation team. It is reliable and gives me confidence when I upgrade firmware and expand the capacities of the data center.

Think about adding compute in 30 minutes instead of hours of technical effort. It reduced the amount of time that tech spent on support and operations instead of maintaining the whole infrastructure level.

ROI for the UCS manager solution is high and has lifted pressures and stressful burdens upon SWE.

Overall, all functionalities are excellent.

The feature that I found the most value is the abstract and stateless capacities. 

USC Central seems a bit confusing for technicians.

Many functionalities that are not used for a small environment should be enforced at the enterprise level.

I would like to see USC Central offered free for use, as well as made simpler to use for technicians. This will improve its adoption rate, especially for environments that are not exposed to the internet.

We have been using UCS Managers and UCS Blade for more than five years.

Stability-wise, it is excellent.

This is a scalable product.

Technical support is excellent.

With the help of Cisco tech support, I just finished an upgrade of firmware and felt that the support team is helpful and proactive in helping customers.

I feel that Cisco tech has value. They provided me assistance and guided me through difficulties. Overall, I felt that they were excellent and I appreciated it very much, especially the consistency in following up on what is happening, including progress.

I had used HP enclosures in a different environment.

The initial setup is always straightforward.

We initiated the engagement with Cisco Tech Team, and eventually, we can take ourselves.

The ROI is huge and I was surprised after seeing it when the environment was set up and stable.

I was not involved with the specific pricing agreement, so I don't know. However, I am familiar with some of the aspects.

Generally, the cheaper, the better. I believe that this is part of the procurement management that must be involved with requirements. Pricing will be based on your requirements so it is important to plan, engage, and negotiate directly with the Cisco Account Manager.

I have an excellent relationship and experience with them. They are accommodating in all areas such as reaching out, checking and engaging in setup and configuration of equipment that has arrived, training, help in designing, consulting, pricing, and licensing.

As part of our evaluation phase, we researched three vendors. Each was assessed using a scorecard to rate each in terms of functionality as it related to our environment. The scale was from one to five.

Overall, this is an excellent product.

Why pick a UCS blade over a Dell, HPE or Lenovo system? The answer depends on what application I need to run. If I want a small-scale, 3-4 server application space in a localized area, I want a rack mount, for a price advantage. If I need a larger-scale virtualized environment, I prefer blades, and for the lowest OpEx as I scale out, I find Cisco's UCS lets me manage a larger footprint with fewer people.

Previously, we focused on CPUs and servers, relying on the Intel cadence for change. With Cisco UCS, we became network-centric and changed our mindset to abstract the server, making it a stateless object for workloads. Managing blade servers logically lets us take full advantage of Moore's law – which started with 640 cores per fabric and now provides 5760 cores for B200-M4 blades in our standard 20 chassis pods; more workloads per pod, and fewer people to manage them. This has significantly improved our OpEx costs.

Cisco is behind as far as SSD qualifications and options allowed, relative to other vendors, but that is in keeping with their philosophy of a stateless working environment. If I add a unique storage attribute to my blades, I encumber it with a state that requires manual intervention to move around.

SSD evolution is coming hard and fast with higher density, lower cost options popping up each quarter. New form factors like M.2, U.2, Multi-TB, NVMe and now signs of Optane are emerging across a range of price points turning the once stolid server domain into the wild west. Dell and HPE have field qualification processes with vendors such that very soon after new products are shipping, they are available for use in their servers.

The process is slower for UCS as Cisco must perform extensive validation to assure compatibility with UCS-Manager. Does the device respond in time to blade controller logic, are there issues with time-outs for UCS-Manager that might have either type 1 or type 2 fault errors. Hence the array of new SSD products are more robust with HPE and Dell than for Cisco.

This goes to the core difference in architectural philosophy between the Legacy server vendors and Cisco that calls for a stateless environment leveraging networked storage so that any workload can be readily moved to a new server as a more powerful system is deployed, or a fault occurs on the old server. If an HPE blade has a local boot option with a new 1TB SSD – then you cannot move that workload remotely to a new 2-socket 36-core blade. You have to have a technician go on site to physically pull the boot SSD from the older blade and insert it into a new blade, then confirm it got the right one. This adds labor cost and slows down the upgrade process – increasing OpEx costs to manage the legacy infrastructure.

We have used this since inception in 2009.

The change in mindset from building stateful servers to stateless devices managed across an intelligent fabric with logical abstraction took about a month for operations to come up to speed on; no looking back since.

We went through the original teething pains of any new system. In particular, once we had our operational epiphany on what the potential was, we were limited by how fast features could be added to UCS Manger. With XML extensions, UCS Central (Manager of Managers) and UCS Director (Automation), we have enough on our plate.

Early on, we encountered scalability issues – UCS was to support 40 chassis – but it only did 10, then increased to 20. 20 chassis (160 servers) is more than enough as Moore's law, increased CPU core count and higher network bandwidth all made for the ability to place more workloads in a pod than we were comfortable with. So, it rapidly caught up.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent. Cisco understands what is needed and it plays to their networking strengths. Ironically, most of my previous rack system problems came down to network constraints as we ran into switch domain boundaries, VLAN mapping issues and so forth; the basic blocking and tackling for Cisco.

We previously used HPE. They had a good blade system and good racks, but their iLO is expensive and gets very complex at scale.

Initial setup was straightforward. More time was spent educating us on UCS Manager, the logical tool, service profiles and the other tools of automated provisioning than physical connectivity, which is child's play.

We bought through a vendor, who showed us how to set up and some tricks of the trade to short circuit the learning process. Then, after a few months, we were cruising at scale.

ROI is not something we share, but I will note that we now use 2 persons to manage 1600 servers in two remote data centers. This is across 25 domains that can all be seen at once and, as alerts come in, drilled down and addressed from a web console.

SSD evolution is coming hard and fast with higher density, lower cost options popping up each quarter. New form factors like M.2, U.2, Multi-TB, NVMe and now signs of Optane are emerging across a range of price points turning the once stolid server domain into the wild west. Dell and HPE have field qualification processes with vendors such that very soon after new products are shipping, they are available for use in their servers.

The process is slower for UCS as Cisco must perform extensive validation to assure compatibility with UCS-Manager. Does the device respond in time to blade controller logic, are there issues with time-outs for UCS-Manager that might have either type 1 or type 2 fault errors. Hence the array of new SSD products are more robust with HPE and Dell than for Cisco.

This goes to the core difference in architectural philosophy between the Legacy server vendors and Cisco that calls for a stateless environment leveraging networked storage so that any workload can be readily moved to a new server as a more powerful system is deployed, or a fault occurs on the old server. If an HPE blade has a local boot option with a new 1TB SSD – then you cannot move that workload remotely to a new 2-socket 36-core blade. You have to have a technician go on site to physically pull the boot SSD from the older blade and insert it into a new blade, then confirm it got the right one. This adds labor cost and slows down the upgrade process – increasing OpEx costs to manage the legacy infrastructure.

Before choosing we also evaluated HPE, Dell, and IBM. We all found that, aside from the physical differences, they had the same architecture and OpEx; external management; local switch infrastructure in each chassis; complex routing rules when scaling domains; and challenges in provisioning new units. Once we learned the "UCS Way," we were more efficient.

We have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for data center operations since 2018. We implemented it in one bank, but everything else is handled by HP.

The Cisco solution provides a unified dashboard that enhances virtualization tasks, allowing configurations from a single interface. It also helps with space and power management, which are vital for data center efficiency.

The dashboard of Cisco UCS B-Series allows users to have multiple options displayed on a single interface and facilitates configuration from that dashboard. This ease of manageability is also appreciated.

It would be beneficial for Cisco UCS B-Series to improve on the technological adaptability aspect, especially with regard to containerized applications, as the market in our region is still adapting to newer technologies. There is also a need for better local parts replacement, as HP is superior in this area.

We have been familiar with and using Cisco UCS B-Series solutions since 2018.

Both Cisco and HP solutions are similar in scalability, supporting up to sixteen blades. There are no significant differences in scalability between the two.

Cisco's tech support is superior to that of HP's, at least online. However, HP surpasses Cisco in local parts availability and replacement.

Positive

Our team handled the implementation as we executed it in a bank successfully while other projects were handled by HP.

Previously, Cisco pricing was higher, but now both Cisco and HP are competitive with pricing. At the end of negotiations, the pricing is usually matched between the two, so cost is not a major differentiating factor anymore.

HP solutions were considered and are still predominantly used.

I recommend focusing on the relationship with the customer as it plays a more significant role than the technical specifications in our region.

We use the solution to help manage our data centers.

Stateless Blade is the best feature. If we have a blade go down we find that the server continues to work well.

The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

Cisco UCS B-Series is stable.

The solution is scalable by adding additional hardware.

The technical support is good but can sometimes be delayed.

Positive

We use HPE BladeSystem and Cisco UCS B-Series but we are going to replace them both with the Cisco X210c M6 series because of the high performance.

The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration is also simple.

The implementation is completed in-house.

The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Around ten administrators are required to manage the solution.

I recommend the solution to others because it has good performance and is highly stable with little downtime.

Cisco UCS utilizes Service Profiles for server provisioning. These are logical profiles that are comprised of many smaller parts, such as BIOS settings, NIC settings, HBA settings, Firmware packages, boot policies and more. Creating consistency within your compute environment has proven valuable. Having the capability to add chassis and/or blades to my environment with just a few cables, and bringing these servers online with the required settings based on my profile is most valuable. Apply a Service Profile to a new, replace or relocated blade, and Cisco UCS takes care of the rest, provisioning as you expect.

Cisco UCS has reduced our physical footprint, drastically simplified management and created strong partnerships between engineering teams.

Software defects that result in false environmental alarms have been a pain point for us. These defects are not operational or performance impacting, but they do result in many hours troubleshooting to rule out any potential risks.

I've been using it for years.

As long as everything is correctly designed and properly patched, deployment is a breeze with instantiation of VMs on-top of a configured UCS environment possible within just a few hours. This is aggressive scheduling, but it’s absolutely possible given the numerous options available for scripting and automation.

We hit a software defect once that caused a reload of some critical assets. This was immediately resolved and is the only true case of a stability issues I have seen.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Cisco TAC is typically great to work with. UCS has a call home feature that will automatically open TAC cases on your behalf when issues arise. I’d recommend calling in critical cases to ensure timely response.

The initial setup as a first-timer can be overwhelming, but once you complete it, any subsequent setup is straightforward. The biggest thing is making sure you properly design the solution and develop a scalable schema. Take into consideration other environmental variables that require specific configuration, such as hypervisor BIOS settings versus bare-metal BIOS settings.

I recommend having someone experienced with UCS perform the initial design and deployment. This could be someone you have in-house, or someone you contract. You’ll want to make sure your schemas as setup properly, any unusual requirements are handled properly, and profiles are built according to best practices for your particular environment.

Cisco UCS changed the server blade game, converging network and compute into a single profile-based platform. Now with HCI, Cisco is converging storage into UCS as well. I recommend getting in contact with Cisco and one of their channel partners for a whiteboard session, design conversation and potential proof-of-concept. This worked well for me in the past. I have since been capable of designing and implementing Cisco UCS environments without aid from external resources, only asking for design validations.