Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution for a server.

Some of the features I like from this solution are it has a fast configuration, it is not complex, and has high availability. 

A long while ago something went wrong with the solution and we had to back-up to the cluster, some stability issues could be improved.

For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle. I recently worked at a company in Cambodia where we were using Oracle, we were having some difficulties with applying the licensing between the solutions.

I have been using the solution for approximately two years.

Over time the solution became more unstable. This is why I planned for a hyper-converged HyperFlex Infrastructure. Hopefully, this will reduce the percentage the server consumes and an overall performance improvement.

We have an internal team that does the support for the solution.

The setup was not complex, there was nothing standing out to me that was difficult.

The price of this solution compared to others is fair.

We have been evaluating Cisco HyperFlex which we will be upgrading soon. I compared the two on itcentralstation.com and downloaded the reports, it is better. There is a current need to choose this upgrade and my team will get on it soon.

I wanted to try out Cisco products because most of the big industries use them such as banks, IT, and telecommunications. Cisco itself produced the server and at the time I researched more about Cisco and then I want to try it. This is why I invested in a tool from Cisco. Additionally, I plan to implement level IP2, HyperFlex soon.

I would recommend this solution for the financial sector and big industry enterprise companies that can invest with Cisco long-term. The scalability, high availability, and security all combined is a good offering.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series a nine out of ten.

Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades. 

I have been working with the product for one year. 

I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten since we encountered bugs during the upgrade. 

The product is scalable and my company has 5000 users for the solution. 

The product's tech support has good people. However, the people in level 1 support do not know what they are talking about. Level 3 support is good. 

Neutral

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. We have two administrators for the product. The tool is a good product but maintenance is not easy. 

The UCS environment as a whole. The hardware is easily swappable and, utilizing the boot from SAN option, you can always keep your server intact due to the service profiles. So if your blade has failures and you have a hot spare, you can transfer the service profile to a new blade and be operational in mere minutes. Huge for uptime and perfect for environments like VMware ESXi hosts, which is what I use them for primarily.

We can be scalable to a greater degree using Cisco UCS. The options available and the connectivity to a Nexus switch with universal ports have been a game changer.

The UCS manager interface needs to be cleaned up a bit and can be streamlined, but no major complaints. Get off Java once and for all and release 3.2 so it can be all HTML 5.

I have been using Cisco UCS since early 2011, so six and a half years.

B-Series blades, along with the C Series tack mounts are the most reliable server hardware platform I have worked with in my 20+ years in the industry.

None. Cisco UCS, to this day, has been the most easily scalable server product I have encountered. Hyper-converged solutions have potential, yet have not shown me that they are scalable at an enterprise level the way the B Series UCS are at this time.

Some of the best in the industry. Always helpful and mostly flexible.

In the past, I have used rack mount and blade solutions from Dell, HPE, and IBM. None of them have come close to the combination of performance and reliability that I get from Cisco.

Initial UCS setup is complex, but once you have your service profiles (templates) configured, adding new blades and provisioning boot LUNs is very easy. Cloning options make it even more so.

Nothing shocking. Very straightforward. Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing.

I have evaluated dozens of server solutions (Dell PowerEdge, IBM X series and HPE ProLiant) and many, many more.

Do it and don’t look back. Just make sure you get strong in-house knowledge of UCS early on, unless you are willing to outsource UCS support to an MSP. It is easily learnable, but there is a bit of a curve to support the overall UCS infrastructure at the start.

• Deployment of new blade/host is quick via using hardware profiles
• No ethernet or fiber cabling required for new blades/hosts
• No zoning required to SAN storage for new blades/hosts
• New chassis can be quickly attached to fabric interconnect for deployment

• Faster deployments of new and replacement hardware
• Compact footprint saves valuable space on the rack.

We have used it for over four years.

Deployment was smooth.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

We used standalone servers which were configured in clustered configuration, and switched because we wanted to improve efficiency.

The initial setup was straightforward. For the hardware setup, you do the following

• Non-blocking 10gig fiber lines going to core network switches from fabric interconnect
• Fiber lines for SAN storage to fiber switches from fabric interconnect 
• Converged data (Network & Storage) on 10gig lines from chassis to fabric interconnect
• Blades/hosts use Converged Network Adapters (CNA)

For the configuration using Cisco UCS manager

• Hardware profiles
• Boot from SAN
• Initial storage and network setup

We implemented through a vendor. If you are new to Cisco UCS platform, I would recommend implementing through a vendor.

Plan carefully and purchase adequate licenses with the initial purchase for better pricing.

• Dell
• HP

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.

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.

The ability to scale to multiple blades and multiple blade chassis quickly and easily.

Customers see benefits in the reduced time to deploy virtual servers. The ability to scale out quickly is an example of that.

The management interface in the current version is Java based. I would like to see a move away from Java based management consoles, which I think Cisco has already road-mapped for the UCS product range.

We completed a deployment of this solution in February 2015.

No, the product has been stable.

It is designed to address scalability.

Cisco technical support is always available 24x7. I rate Cisco technical support 10/10.

We specifically implemented UCS to cater specifically for a customer’s Cisco Unified Communication products, which were all running on Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS). The Cisco MCS platform is now End-of-Life, so UCS was the life cycle replacement option. The MCS platform also had limitations with virtualisation which the UCS product suite overcomes. More recently, the customer’s platform services team have recently purchased another Cisco 5108 blade server chassis and more UCS-B blade servers to replace their HP blade server solution.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization.

The management interface needs a lot of improvement. As it is right now, it's a pain to use. It's not user-friendly.

For some clients, it may be useful if it was possible to switch the role for a server. I myself am running a VMware shop and so I would not personally gain any benefit from this, however, I see the value it would have for others - especially service providers.

I've been working with this solution for seven years at this point. It's been quite a while now.

The stability of the solution is fantastic. It's one of the greatest selling features. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's extremely reliable.

The solution scales pretty well. We have not had any issues with that.

Currently, I'm the only one using the product in our organization.

I've never used technical support, so I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness.

I also have worked with IBM as well. 

At the time, the biggest difference was pricing. Also, there is the ability to switch roles or templates on the servers within IBM. However, it's not anything I have had any use for.

In our case, the solution's initial setup was not straightforward. It was rather complex.

It was part of a FlexPoint solution. And it was one of the first FlexPoint solutions delivered in the country. It was not the same solution delivered as the salesperson had promised.

You can typically get reasonable pricing on the solution. The hardware itself, however, isn't the biggest cost. The biggest cost is licensing, and that can be quite expensive.

If there are other organizations considering the solution, I'd strongly advise that they get training on the management side. It's very important to do this in order to successfully implement and use the product.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a seven. It's good, however, it could use a simpler management structure. Cheaper licensing would go a long way as well. The UCS isn't the expensive part. It's more the Microsoft and VMware and the cost of running that.