Cisco UCS Manager Reviews

I am an executive consultant. I design solutions, sell solutions, install solutions, and provide support. I don't directly work with companies in that respect, and I don't really support them.

One of the valuable features is the user interface base, specifically the C user interface.

We mainly use Cisco UCS Manager to integrate and manage our Cisco switches across the building. We also utilize it for network integration. It provides an integrated solution for our Cisco environment, streamlining our operations and managing multiple Cisco devices like switches and routers.

Cisco UCS Manager has made provisioning of new equipment very fast and efficient. It reduces the required workforce, especially for network integration, simplifying management and enhancing the efficiency of our Cisco environment.

Our primary use case for this solution is to help us manage our infrastructure and reduce time and effort for these tasks.

Right now it has improved only some things as we need to upgrade for additional functionality.

As I am working in a financial institute, we primarily use Cisco UCS Manager for non-core applications, which can be described as tier two applications.

A main feature of Cisco UCS Manager is its reliability, as all of the computing blades are in cluster mode. We experience high availability and can easily add compute resources and beef up the computing solution.

We use Cisco UCS Manager to manage the servers associated with it, monitor or manage firmware upgrades, and push policies. It's like the brain of the UCS system, in which users can log into Cisco UCS Manager and control all the infrastructure below it. All the configurations for servers and Fabric Interconnect can be done by the Cisco UCS Manager. Nowadays, users are opting for a cloud solution instead of using Cisco UCS Manager.

The solution's firmware upgrade has improved our operational efficiency. When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time. We can have a template service profile that can be applied to any number of servers. We just need to clone it and apply it. In case of a vulnerability, we just need to go to the template and change it. It's all policy-driven, which makes the admin's life much easier. Also, it will be consistent across all the infrastructure servers.

We are managing servers and the UCS Mini Switch. The company installed a couple of servers and a Blade server for our production traffic. We have this higher production load and a backup solution on site for storing secure, critical data and applications.

It's a redundancy solution for critical banking applications and anything else running on top of the server. You can run any kind of application through redundancy, so it'll be easier to manage on the UCS side.

Five people on my team use UCS Manager, but people on other teams have a different UCS server. We don't use UCS Manager much. We still have a couple of Cisco servers, but we primarily rely on other vendors like Dell and HP. 

Cisco UCS has different layers of security, and you can do multiple installations of your LIAMs on top of the server and Blade. You can install VMware, Windows Server, Hyper-V, etc.