Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service vs. HashiCorp Terraform

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.

Incentivized

8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
• Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
• Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
• Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
• Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.

Incentivized

We use it every single day and love the ease of it and the integration of all our servers

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

I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating

Incentivized

Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional 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

Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.

Incentivized

• 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.

• we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
• having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
• if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
• writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team