Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

Our whole VMware Farm is running on Flexpod, which uses the UCS B-Series for compute resources. Using the Blade along with Fibre Interconnect, it provides high availability and ease of migration to other hardware in case of failure. The cabling and power footprint is at the lowest so far.

It provides high availability with flexibility and a single point of administration using the Flexpod solutions. With all of the hardware on a single dashboard, it is easy to troubleshoot and to administer. The blade system provides faster back-end communication between systems.

The most valuable features of this solution are profiling, ease of administration, and monitoring.

Profiling provides easier deployment and configuration, especially if the new systems are intended only to increase compute resources.

The Dashboard is quite impressive and is, so far, the best based on my experience. It provides a detailed view that is easy to follow. The cross-links on the information are great.

I would like to see the availability increased during upgrades and patching. There are patches that cannot be implemented without any downtime or reboot required. If the newer version could eliminate downtime during patches or firmware upgrades, it would be great.

This solution is very much stable, especially the network side.

Scalability is very flexible, thanks to Profiling of the hardware on which you can transfer the profile of a system to another without any action or configuration needed.

Technical support is great all the way, although no major issues have yet been encountered in terms of UCS / Flexpod.

Prior to this solution, we used an HP Blade C3000 System. Based on the reviews and corporate standard we went to Cisco Flexpod solutions.

The initial setup of this solution is impressive.

The vendor helped us implement the Flexpod, and we would rate them an eight out of ten.

The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

Right now we haven't encountered any issues on our system that could result in our KPI being impacted.

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. 

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.

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 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.

Mostly VMs, for hosting virtual infrastructure. It represents 99 percent of our computing workforce.

The versatility of the solution is the most helpful to us.

The way the hardware is separated from the software definition of the components.

Better UI. Cisco makes a great product but doesn't know how to make a UI.

Very stable and very reliable.

It is a blade system so it's fairly scalable.

I've used technical support and it's above average.

We had a bad experience with IBM servers, which is why we decided to change solutions. Also, as a bank, the switch was a money-driven process. They offered us a very good deal to test the new solution and it became widely spread throughout the company. 

Reliability, price, support, and scalability are important factors for us in selecting a vendor.

Coming from a server background, it wasn't straightforward at all. It is a process that is closer to requiring telecommunication knowledge than server knowledge. Once you overcome that little step at the beginning it's fine, but at the beginning it was a little difficult to understand.

My advice to a colleague looking at this or a similar solution would be to test it. When we started, Cisco UCS was the first solution on the market and the only one that provided certain capabilities hardware-wise. It was the one with the most cores per CPU and it was the one with the most memory per blade server. Of course, now there are other vendors in the market. If I were to start the search process right now, I would consider Cisco UCS, but also other vendors like Dell and HPE, which are making new blade servers. They are coming up with different solutions and are catching up to the market. Until there is something really new on the market, like UCS had when they started, UCS is facing some competition.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Two points go to the UI, which is lacking. Also, the way you can actually switch from one system to another doesn't allow for the easy transfer of all of the server definitions.

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 stability is very, very good. I haven't had any issues with it whatsoever over the past few years.

The scalability is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution basically offers us everything we need. It's very complete. 

The pricing could be improved, as it is a bit expensive solution.

The GUI is not the greatest. They could work on improving the interface.

I've been using the solution for a few years now. It's been a while. 

The stability, in general, has been amazing. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Cisco is extremely reliable and offers good performance. 

The scalability has been great. We started with a small amount, and we started to test the solution. After that, we grew with it as we needed. It's been great and has fit our needs perfectly.

There are thousands of users on the solution. It's used extensively.

We haven't had cause to sue technical support too much. We have Cisco partners we can call if we have issues, however, we haven't had many problems to speak of. 

We have found the initial setup to be very simple and straightforward. It's not a complex process. A company shouldn't struggle with a deployment. 

The solution can be quite expensive and is a bit of a higher cost when compared to others on the market.

We're a customer and an end-user.

Our current version is an older version. Right now, we are considering replacing it with the newest one.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. We've been pretty happy with it overall.

I would rate it at a nine out of ten.