AWS CloudFormation vs. Cisco Intersight vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect

I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks.

Incentivized

It is highly suited for an organisation pushing for a standardised and centralised configuration of settings using policies, profiles and templates. It is highly suited for customers used to legacy UMM that need to refresh their environment, but instead of deploying them in UMM (which is still possible), to take the time and effort to learn Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and IMM as well as familiarise themselves with the differences between UMM and IMM, and the issues in UMM which IMM addresses and improves upon. We deployed in UMM initially then transitioned to IMM with the transition too. I cannot think of a scenario where Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service would not be suited. Even for small-scale deployments, it provides significant benefits. Maybe if you come from another server vendor management environment, the learning curve may feel steep (e.g. many new concepts and constructs that one has to master).

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect provides Intent-Based Policies and Unified Operations which is equal for all customers . Complexity is eliminated and common services and rules are provided across clouds and on-premises settings with the help of an integrated service stack and automated deployment. There is nothing specific scenario where we found that it is not suitable for current environment.

Incentivized

• All resources can segregated based on stacks which provides greater visibility
• A complete audit trail of what went wrong while deploying a particular resource
• Automatically rollbacks if any service as part of CloudFormation results in an error
• The UI tool is useful

Incentivized

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Incentivized

• Centralized Hybrid ingress for our cloud workloads
• Centralized ingress for our existing on-prem BIG-IP devices
• Application visibility to address end-to-end visibility into the end-user experience

Incentivized

• Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved.
• Slow to create, delete or update.
• Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them.

Incentivized

• It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
• If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
• It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
• It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
• UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.

Incentivized

• The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
• Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address

Incentivized

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

Incentivized

Architectural change with a focus on multi-cloud

Incentivized

It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.

Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.

However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.

Incentivized

Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

Incentivized

So far over the past 4 years we have not experienced any issues with the servers being available.

Incentivized

Could need some more refinement. It takes some time getting used to where different settings are being defined.

Incentivized

Overall, F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is responsive and has many features. There is minor clunkiness in how certain scroll bars are layered. This may cause some adverse experience when trying to manage this product through a zoomed browser. Page loading and refresh timers were all very much responsive. There is a good amount of feedback from the interface as well.

Incentivized

I have had servers TAC cases open for issues with Cisco Intersight. Some have yet to be resolved. One case that is still open is where the HCL status ( Hardware Compatibility List ) shows not validated when It should be. We have several servers that have the exact same hardware, OS, and the same firmware. One server will show the HCL is not validated but all others will

Incentivized

You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

Incentivized

Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

Incentivized

Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information. Management guide.For information copy of the original. The new virtual Cloning virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information

Incentivized

I personally think that Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is at the top of its class when it comes to managing data center hardware. The cloud-connected design feels very modern and easy to use. The mobile app is something I wouldn't expect to get in a server management tool. The way it can update, monitor, and manage our servers is very nice. Overall, we are very happy with it.

Incentivized

Similar, very similar to both. The main difference has been existing relationships with F5 as a partner and future potential for layering on future advanced services on top later. Often a difficult sell initially as both competitors have larger networks, but often can outclass Akamai in terms of capabilities, when against Cloudflare it is most difficult when no existing relationship exists to not consider Cloudflare's larger footprint.

Incentivized

Easy to add new services into it. Having everything policy driven makes it a lot easier to add new hardware into the solution and get setup.

Incentivized

• + We can standup a VPC in minutes
• - It took a lot of inital time to set up
• + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.

Incentivized

• The negative thing is that we prefer to use the UCS Manager in our company because this bare metal is integrated into the FI and no extra appliance is required. SaaS is generally not viewed favorably in Germany.
• Telling the user that they have to buy Intersight licenses even if they use UCS Manager annoys our customers.

Incentivized

• Improved Network Performance and Reduced Latency
• Enhanced Security and Cost Savings on DDoS Mitigation
• Automated Cloud Network Provisioning and Increased DevOps Efficiency
• Better Network Visibility and Performance Analytics

Incentivized