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.
Oracle Exalogic in conjunction with an Oracle Exadata based platform is what I would consider the best of breed solution; however the performance may be overkill for what you need. Don't spend the money unless you need the performance, Oracle offers other solutions at a much lower cost. Purchase what you need not what's the shiny new product.
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.
Private Cloud: in the virtual configuration, you can create several accounts and assign different resources (vCPU, RAM, etc.) to several departments in your organization.
SDP & Infiband: Oracle Exalogic can be connected to Oracle Exadata using Infiniband Fabric, to take advantage of high bandwidth and low latency network to connect Weblogic to Oracle Database.
Standardization: Oracle Weblogic Server running on Oracle Exalogic is the same software running on a normal Linux machine, so you can easily move Java applications without changing it, and immediately benefit from the Exalogic Optimizations.
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
Currently, the management of Exalogic is a little arcane. There is a good chance that Oracle can bring flexibility into the control stack because we have seen changes with each version of the software Echo was an improvement and foxtrot even more so. The ability to easily change VM shapes was another welcome change.
Again the fact arises that to build a very high performance machine there will be idiosyncrasies and a certain amount of retraining may be required. I think this is one area where Exalogic lacks not as a product but as a solution is that there isn't as much good knowledge available about it as there is for other engineered systems.
The Exalogic default setup could do with an SSD storage option, currently the onboard comes with a spinning disk.
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.
It is a very condensed version of what used to be rows of servers. I like that storage, networking and compute nodes fit in one rack. The power and the software are top notch. The only problem is cost. You need to do some serious processing to get the true value out of the Exalogic system.
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.
It's hard to compare Oracle Exalogic Engineered Systems with anything else on the market. It's so purpose built for application performance and intended to be used in conjunction with other Oracle Engineered Systems. As I alluded to earlier in this review the cost may not be worth the investment if the performance isn't needed. Oracle offers other solutions like the Oracle PCA which will meet the need for licensing compliance at a much lower cost of ownership and may fit better into your current infrastructure.
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.
