Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

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.

We are a system integrator and promote Dell solutions to our customers. We deal mostly with mid-range storage, servers, and some backup solutions.

It allows us to offer a variety of Dell products to our customers, helping them with secure data backup and recovery, particularly those in the financial sector.

Dell has a huge portfolio of products. It's easy to find whatever you need, and you can combine many types of products into a solution.

Dell should address the issue of direct support and spare parts availability in our region. There can be problems if a specific part is not in stock, which is a big issue for our market.

We have been familiar with Dell Data Domain for about three or four years.

Dell does not provide direct support in our region, which is a big disadvantage. Other vendors such as Cisco, HP, and Lenovo do not have this issue.

Neutral

Cisco UCS pricing is reasonable and competitive. However, with Dell, the additional cost of spare parts and the lack of direct support add to the overall cost of the equipment.

HP, Lenovo, and other vendors do not have the same issue with spare parts and support as Dell.

We sometimes recommend Cisco UCS B-Series over Dell for midsize enterprises, government institutions, financial sectors, and other various types of companies. It depends on the situation and the customer's preference.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The solution is being used for our internal use along with VMware.

The solution is very unified and the technical team is very supportive, no help is needed from outside vendors. 

Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware. 

I have been using Cisco for the last ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

It is a scalable solution. A total of fifty users are using the solution at the moment. 

The technical support team is knowledgeable, customer-friendly and fast in their responses. 

As long as one knows the process, the installation is straightforward. The deployment takes a week's time as it's a big installation. A group of engineers are required for the deployment. The deployment is done by taking track installations and then a few more updates and putting them under the sphere, and you should be using Cisco UCS Manager for the updates.

I have seen a return on investment. 

Cisco is compatible with Mac and Dell. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

After having used, configured and deployed HP and Dell blade systems, I was rather impressed at the time the initial setup of the UCS blade system took to achieve operational status. I was also very impressed with the thorough thought that went into the UCS Manager console and its capabilities as a whole. The conceptual layout of the UCSM was a technical breakthrough and though I tried to not compare it to HP or Dell, it was impossible not to. As our implementations grew and our overall knowledge of the system also grew, there was no turning back. The Cisco UCS team made what used to take hours to configure, setup and deploy, literally take minutes using their Cisco PowerCLI toolkit.

Another aspect of the Cisco UCS system that overshadows that of other technologies is the networking backbone that supports the blades themselves. Cisco created a network switch (control plane) in essence that caries both server traffic and uplink traffic from a single pair of "Fabric Interconnects". These Fabric Interconnects are capable of FC, FCoE and traditional Ethernet, thus making all the ports unified. Acting as the "brains" of the UCS Blade Server system and depending on the version of the Cisco Fabric Interconnects, the pair of fabric interconnects are capable of managing several UCS Blade Chassis and therefore eliminating the need to purchase more switching unnecessarily. The UCS Fabric Interconnects are capable of managing up to 5-10 Blade Chassis with 8 blades per chassis on a single pair of Fabric Interconnects. This is quite a large number of blade servers running from a single pair of Fabric Interconnects.

As you can see, the system scales nicely and the price point drops as your infrastructure grows in size, thus making the initial ROI even more attractive and feasible to make a business case in its favor.

The product’s most valuable features are:

• FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet)
• iSCSI services
• QoS policies
• Call-home
• Direct connectivity to SAN Storage
• Hardware abstraction via Service Profiles
• Virtual Network Adapters from the Cisco VIC 1240 & 1340 series interfaces
• Diskless servers (boot from SAN)
• Reduced server provisioning time
• RBAC security
• Manageability or ease of use (single point of management)

Our company provides solutions that enable our customers to succeed. We thrive on our customers’ ability to see the value in our proposed solutions, so as to bring to their organizations a product that not only solves their current infrastructure constraints, but also resolves those that may arise in the future. We have many partnerships with several vendors in the same technology space, but we have aligned with Cisco due to their excellent blade server products and also their marquee products in the network switch arena.

Today, our business continues to grow with the inclusion of Cisco UCS at every possible opportunity. Now, even more than before, with go-market campaigns that focus on the Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and accompanying storage arrays that are supported by Cisco and Cisco UCS.

Areas that require improvement are notably small in comparison to other similar products. The UCS system would benefit from less-expensive performance monitoring tools or other third-party tools that perform this function. Surprisingly enough, that is all I can come up with at this time.

I have used it for five years.

Stability is a non-issue with Cisco UCS. We have not had any stability issues and to just mention, the Cisco UCS team employs strenuous testing mechanisms of all the UCS components. They provide this for all their firmware updates prior to public release. This is not to say that we've not had any issues, but the issues have been extremely small in comparison to the amount of systems we've deployed. Those issues were quickly identified, rectified and the systems were brought back online in a prompt manner with minimal customer business impact.

Cisco UCS scales rather well and while all other systems are online, therefore allowing for in-place upgrades and updates. The system provides great scalability and versatility in regards to system growths and business requirements. You can easily add additional chassis and blade servers with no impact to the systems running in production.

Cisco TAC has been phenomenal in most cases, but we have had a couple of minor instances where the issue took a bit longer than it should have to be resolved. I’d would say we have had a 97% success rate in most of our cases we’ve opened through Cisco TAC, that resolved our issues within the four-hour window we had expected and subscribed to.

We previously provided our customers with the HP blade system solution. As we began to become more familiar with the Cisco UCS system and we found it to be just as stable, if not more stable, we therefore shifted our solutions to include Cisco UCS B Series blade systems in lieu of HP. Our decision for this paradigm shift was due to the following factors:

• Ease of setup
• Reduced complexity of the network
• Overall technology solution, support and maintenance
• Product scalability
• Performance
• Cisco’s easy procurement quote, build and ordering process

Setup for a first-time administrator of UCS will be somewhat time consuming, in the sense that Cisco UCS virtualizes just about every aspect of the hardware. The installation requires the installer/administrator to pre-provision several aspects of the physical hardware in a virtualized sense. As an example, the installer needs to pre-provision MAC addresses, fiber-channel HBA WWNN & WWNP namespaces, KVM address pools, management (KVM) address pools, iSCSI IQN names, iSCSI IP address pools and other items that become part of the “stateless” server attributes. These all become inclusive to the service profile assigned to each server, but are also unique to each.

Once the installer has some familiarity with the Cisco UCS blade server system, the setup phases become much like setting up a traditional rack server(s) and their respective networking in many ways. Just like anything else, once you’ve done it a few times, you become more and more proficient in your abilities to execute in a more expedient manner.

The Cisco UCS solution is more expensive in price comparisons with other similar solutions. You will be very happy to have had spent the money upfront and you will look like a rock star to your management and customer base by choosing Cisco UCS blade server system for your infrastructure needs. The pricing and licensing of the Cisco UCS system is comparable to other systems. Overall, your licensing and pricing costs will decrease exponentially over time in comparison to the other vendor branded blade server systems. I would recommend you at least allow yourselves the opportunity to review the Cisco UCS offerings and schedule a demo from your local Cisco UCS product vendor.

We also evaluated:
- Dell
- HP
- IBM

Find a local Cisco UCS Partner that has a lot of experience setting up Cisco UCS. It does require some infrastructure knowledge for northbound connectivity outside the UCS blade server system and has to be well thought out in terms of how it will integrate into your existing infrastructure. Other than this caveat, the UCS System is easy to install, setup and configure once you have it in your possession.

Our relationship has grown stronger with Cisco due to our own internal decisions to encompass the Cisco hardware where and if at all possible. Our decision to use, sell and deploy Cisco UCS is solely due to all the reasons I’ve already mentioned plus more. Cisco has surely outdone the competition here on this one.

The solution's most valuable feature is KVM Launch Manager.

The solution's console could be easier for accessing and managing internal help documents.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

The solution's stability is good. Although, it is much more complicated regarding usage or management compared to other vendors.

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. It could be improved.

At present, we have implemented it on Hyper V clusters. We have eight blades on two clusters and six blades on one cluster. In total, we have 250 servers installed from those clusters.

The solution's initial setup process works fine.

The solution is a little more complicated compared to HP and PowerEdge configurations. Also, its KVM manager could be more straightforward similar to other vendors.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It should have KVM connectivity similar to Dell and HP. Also, HP has a storage blade that helps connect monitors in case of network issues. We can plug in and access the keyboard and mouse to start with the task. It is not possible with Cisco Infrastructure.

We use this product for SAP HANA in a QA development environment. It is at the core of our business.

The most valuable feature is the service profile.

The amount of RAM that it supports for HANA is good.

The maintenance is very easy.

The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler.

The administration is somewhat complex.

I have been using the UCS B-Series for more than six years.

This is a very stable product.

The UCS B-Series is easy to scale. We have approximately 1,000 people using this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times and I would say that they are efficient.

Prior to working with this product, we used the HPE c7000 enclosure. Once we started using SAP HANA, we implemented Cisco. Our main environment still uses the HPE.

The HPE is more difficult to maintain because all of the addresses are hardcoded inside the enclosure. With Cisco, it is much easier.

The initial setup took us approximately one week. If you are connecting to a SAN then you need to bring up all of the virtual VLANs and set up the storage. It takes a lot of time.

We had assistance from the vendor for our deployment, and our in-house administrators are taking care of the maintenance.

Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees. The only thing that we pay for separately is VMware.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for infrastructure management.

The architecture of this solution is very valuable; it has five traffic interconnects, and uses a network highway so bandwidth is never an issue.

The main issue with this solution is that it is quite vendor-restricted, meaning that when we use third party software, we cannot use all of the available configuration tools or pre-validated design features.

We would like to see a storage solution added to this product as, at present, there is no file system storage available.

Also, this product is very expensive, and whilst they will apply discounts for larger projects, these are not as competitive as those offered by other vendors of comparative solutions.

We have been working with this solution for over eight years.

We have found this to be a very stable solution.

In our experience, this is a scalable solution.

We find the technical support team to be knowledgeable and responsive, but they are often slow to come back with a root-cause analysis of our issues.

Positive

The initial setup for this solution is easy and straightforward.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We do not use the Cisco UCS B-Series in our company. Rather, we support it for one of our customers.

Using this product allows for the virtualization of all things, including MAC addresses and the profile. If we have an issue in a physical server then we just have to remove it, put another one in its place, and reapply the profile.

I'm not an expert in using the UCS Blade but I work on it enough to speak a little bit about it. My primary job is support, although I perform some actions.

The most valuable feature is the ability to replace a server with another one, simply by applying the profile. This is not possible with others, where the MAC address is not virtualized.

If there is an issue with a server then it's simple to replace. In 10 minutes, it can be done, even if there's a hardware issue. This is the most powerful and important aspect.

This model does not support virtualization of the switch.

There are occasionally hardware problems that may be related to memory. 

I have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for two years. The company was using the same solution before I joined.

Although we have experienced some hardware issues, that is normal for this product. Overall, it is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

We have four people that work with it.

When we have had hardware problems, technical support comes to our site to replace the defective part. The support team is good, including their response time.

I did not work with other similar products before this one.

There is a new model, the X-Series, that I would like to look at in the future. The B-series will be deprecated shortly. After which, we will need to replace it.

I was not part of the deployment, although I have performed general support such as creating profiles.

Overall, this Cisco Blade is really good. My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to purchase the support agreement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.