Cisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017). Cisco's modern HCI solution is Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix.
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Hyper-V
Score 8.2 out of 10
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$24.95
per month
Pricing
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Hyper-V
Editions & Modules
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Developer
$24.95
per month
Bronze
$49.00
per month
Silver
$89.00
per month
Gold
$135.00
per month
Platinum
$199.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Hyper-V
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Hyper-V
Features
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Hyper-V
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
Hyper-V makes a lot of sense in scenarios that will support several Windows Server-based OS virtual machines. The only limitation of those licensed VMs is the hardware that hosts the Hyper-V role. If you need to deploy many servers running Windows Server OS, it is worth the price. Hyper-V also does a great job of managing the server host's computational resources, including memory, CPU, network, and storage.
UCS manager in HX is truly helping us in doing one touch firmware upgrades. Scaling of HX cluster (in few minutes) is too seamlessly due to service profiles.
HX does not hold you back by creating a single data store unlike other HCI products. With HX, you can create multiple data stores and allocate those to desired services. This help logically separate the install base on HX and removes confusion for the admins too.
We run high IOPs workload on HX, and we never felt latency issues due to the Cisco backbone (as you get FI as a TOR switch and options to choose 10G or 40G speeds).
With HX you truly enjoy a single window support from Cisco including for the top of the rack switch (FI in HX case). In other HCI infra, you certainly have to bank on to network switch vendor for support and bring HCI and switch vendor at one pane for troubleshooting latency related issues.
While we increased our footprint on HX, we didn't added additional administrators to support the landscape. This was possible because of the simplicity in managing HX clusters.
With HX we had setup stretched cluster between two near site data centres. This is a unique proposition in HX (we have 2 nodes in each data centre) and data centre failover works absolutely seamless.
Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
there is the problem with starting cluster where there are not outside DNS and NTP services so we need to workaround this with additional storage or hosting it on the local storage.. many clusters has internal DNS/NTP services not available from outside and they need to be hosted on the HX
there is not RBAC or user mgmt on the CVMs so it is difficult to not add full permission for the people responsible for just shutdown and power on the cluster
native snapshots support with ibm backup products
running from not the only last snapshot in all use cases
We manage Hyper-V using both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the in-build Hyper-V administration tool, the former being the main product we use as the built-in tool is very light on functionality, unlike VMware ESXi.
Management of storage is not great and quite a shift away from how VMware does it with ESXi; there is no separate panel/blade/window for LUNs/data stores, which means there is a lot of back and forth when trying to manage storage.
A dedicated client with all functionality in one place would be awesome.
Having the equivalent of ESXi's virtual console is something which is absolutely needed.
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
It is quite intuitive. Junior techs are able to provision and administrate Hyper-V virtual server infrastructure with little to no additional training. Documentation from Microsoft is easily avaliable and decently well written. Hyper-V is reliable and does what it is supposed to. Can be admin from an intuitive gui, or aoutmated with extensive powershell.
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
More documentation is available now than when the product initially came out (which was an issue early on). Because it only supports UCS hardware, I think it does help with support issues. Nutanix has to support much more hardware. At the same time, you're dealing with the Cisco TAC, which can be mixed at times.
I gave it a middle of the road rating - as far as getting direct help from Microsoft this never seems to happen. (Good luck getting ahold of them.) Getting help from online support forums is pretty much where I get all my help from. Hyper-V is used quite widely and anything you could need help with is out there and easily searched for on your favorite search engine.
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
HyperFlex is built on top of Cisco UCS infrastructure, which allows us to manage other non-HX servers attached to the same UCS environment. This allows us to tie everything together via Intersight and see all of the servers in our data centers. Other platforms don't really have a comparable offering.
VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
The simplified management makes it easier to operate and prevents mistakes.
Guided installation using the installer VM means you don't have to configure every component by hand. Improves deployment speed and lowers the risk of configuration issues.
Performance increase of 40-90% compared to our previous compute/storage cluster.
Massively positive impact on expenses in my company by reducing our storage needs drastically. We were able to reallocate the budget to upgrading our primary Hyper-V server with pure enterprise SSD's as we reduced the storage needs by over 50% and by this we increased performance by over 400%.
We have deployed more than 8 servers with EXTREMELY minimal cost using Hyper-V and not requiring another hardware server to host it. We have leveraged our hardware resources in our 2 servers so well that we were able to add many new services, not in place prior, as we did not have the servers to host them. Now with Hyper-V, we deployed many more servers in VM's, purchased OS's & CAL's, but did not need any hardware, which is the greatest expense of all.
With Hyper-V, our ROI was reduced from 36-40 months on our primary server, down to only 13 months by reducing costs of storage and adding so many more servers, by calculating the "would-be" cost of those servers that was avoided by creating them in Hyper-V.
