What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?

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.

The initial setup and service profile deployment can be tricky and should be improved for ease of use.

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.

Regarding improvements, there's a drawback with the FC functionality being removed from the Nexus switches, which we used to do integration with. Now, this requires having a different standalone switch for storage connectivity. Previously, the unified port functionality allowed the same port to function as both FC and Ethernet, however, this has now changed.

The product pricing needs improvement.

Despite the benefits gained from the product implementation, the cost could be more appealing if the overall cost of ownership were reduced.

First of all, Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing. They charge recurring fees every year for everything, even adding phones. Technically, it's good, but that is one fault. Previously, it was perpetual. Buy it and use it. But now, it has changed.

There are some shortcomings in the product when you look at it from the perspective of the area involving multiple configurations, making it an aspect where improvements are required. The server configuration, along with various other configurations, can be improved. From the product's console perspective, some improvement is needed. From a configuration perspective, the product should introduce the tool with more configurations in the market to suit the requirements of multiple customer bases. In the future, I want the tool to offer different flexibility for the configurations on the hardware front that can be incorporated into them.

There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors like Dell and HP.

The product could be made more secure.

The solution’s pricing could be improved and made cheaper.

From a physical hardware point of view, it's excellent compared to Dell and HP, but from Cisco UCS Manager, it should be more user-friendly. There are certain things not described in the UCS Manager, like changing or editing profiles. It should be more user-friendly. In future releases, I would like to see an automated setup process.

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

The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details. The price of the product's license could be improved.

The cost of the product is its biggest weakness. It is more expensive than the competitors.

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

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

InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting. I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot. The solution is expensive. Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.

The cost is expensive and has room for improvement.

The price of the solution could improve.

The upgrades could be improved because the software needs various upgrades to be safeguarded against liability. Cisco should be very close to the customer to tell them if they need a new upgrade. In addition, they should include other features to make it useful for public cloud computing.

If a customer is moving towards a UCS-only solution, then it would be great if storage could be provided with it. Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy.

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.

This model does not support virtualization of the switch. There are occasionally hardware problems that may be related to memory.

The license is expensive. Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.

This product uses a converged network adapter because it is the only way to provide flexibility with both fiber and ethernet connections.

Cisco UCS B-Series competitors have similar features as they do, Cisco needs to make some changes to make their offering better. The integration and support could improve, there are some challenges. Additionally, the competitor has its own storage in its portfolio, Cisco should have the option as well.

The graphic code that UCS can support is limited and less accessible than other systems.

We sometimes have small issues with the hardware elements. The network interfaces could be better. The product needs to develop better firmware. The solution is difficult to set up. You need to be experienced in the product in order to be able to implement it.

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.

The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable.

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 to have Java to manage the infrastructure. It would be great if we can manage the infrastructure through a web browser. We have Dell EMC, and I would like to connect my product directly to the chassis. I would like to have an interface to integrate the storage directly chassis and not through the network. If that could be possible, that would be great for me.

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.

Managing could be improved. It's too hard. The pricing could be less.

The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved. In particular, integration with other products is difficult, especially for logging purposes. In this regard, it is not very good and improvement is required. Technical support should be more timely.

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.

In terms of room for improvement, I think there is room for improvement with the service profile. Cisco products are technically quite bulky if you ask me. You really need to be very proficient technically to deploy it and to understand the assignment of the service profiles before you can really make the most of it. The product comes with a lot of technical overhead. I know they have advancements that are coming and I foresee they are ready to address that problem at least to a certain extent. For the purposes it is built for, I can not really think of any room for improvement, honestly. It is as advertised; it is doing what it is supposed to in the way the company represents it. I do not think they are really in need of any other improvement this year than what I know they already have on the roadmap. The only thing I can think of might be improving the user-friendliness.

Integration with the storage to get a heatmap of what's going on in the storage site could be improved -- the dashboard, that kind of thing. We have a virtualized environment and it's the same dashboard that links together the front end, the VMware and the backend storage. We have to use multiple views, multiple solutions for that. We log in to multiple places to see what's going on in the storage, what's going on in the switches, on the Blades, on the VMware. It would be great if there was a single platform, a dashboard that could integrate all of those. That kind of improvement wouldn't just help me but would also benefit management. If they want to see what's going on, for example, to get a five-year forecast, and the dashboard could show how much space is left for computing power, or show that something is not working, that would make a difference.

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

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.

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