Cisco FabricPath vs. vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), discontinued

Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.

Incentivized

If you already have the Enterprise level licensing, you may as well use it as opposed to pay for another third-party plug-in, i.e., SolarWinds.

Incentivized

• It scales fairly well.
• It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
• It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.

Incentivized

• Resources allocation estimates are amazing, this feature allowed us to increase density on our hosts by reclaiming RAM and CPU from over allocated VMs letting us increase the amount of VMs per host. The report was very clear and easy to understand.
• The planing feature enabled us to gather all the info we needed to plan hardware purchases as it showed us, with our current rate of deployment, when we would reach capacity in or environment.
• The heat maps provided excellent drill down capabilities allowing for proactively resolving potential issues.

Incentivized

• We've had a few bugs that have caused random reloads of switches when modifying VLANS.
• We've had a bug that reloaded an entire fabric at once.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to be able to make configuration changes either directly in vCenter Operations Manager or have it link back to the correct locations in vCenter.

Incentivized

Support has always been very good with vCenter Operations Manager.

Incentivized

In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.

Incentivized

The UI is heads and shoulders above VM Turbo, much clearer and user friendly. I did not like the cost modeling used in that product.

Incentivized

• FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.

Incentivized

• The over allocation report allowed us to postpone new hardware purchases by 16 months by reclaiming resources.
• Pro activeness to resolve issues with the build in alarms

Incentivized