Likelihood to Recommend Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.
Read full review The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.
Read full review Pros Ease of implementation of our UCS-X Platforms Ease of Management Cross visibility to our Data Center Infrastructure (Network, Storage, Compute) Ability to Automate our configurations Ability to create profiles for better consistency and standardization Read full review VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up. Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less. Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads. Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution. Read full review Cons Interface is quite slow Interface tree (navigating between server, profile, blade, chassis, FI, etc) is counterintuitive and needs more links in the tree Deploying minor changes takes much longer than in UCSM or UCSC Read full review We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains. We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away. The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We use it every single day and love the ease of it and the integration of all our servers
Read full review Usability 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.)
Read full review Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with
vSphere . The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.
Read full review Support Rating Support for this platform is unmatched. I've used only a couple of other platforms, honestly, but Cisco Intersight's support system really works, and they do a great job. Any issue I've had was solved in a timely manner with a polite representative who cared about helping me and not just plainly reading off of a script that doesn't actually help. I rate it well.
Read full review Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.
Read full review Return on Investment It is positive for a few people being able to manage a lot of hardware It does put the management in the cloud, which some could argue is a security vulnerability. It is difficult to move hardware from Intersign managed to standalone. Read full review we have realized savings in the licensing compared to traditional storage (over $500,000 over the last 5 years) we have realized ROI through efficiencies in our staff of approx $1MM (over the last 5 years) also, positive impact on the time to value/speed of implementation allowed us to realize business objectives (Over $1MM of ROI) Read full review ScreenShots