Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service vs. HashiCorp Vagrant

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

I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.

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

• Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
• Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
• I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.

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

• Because Vagrant is a low-level tool with many ways to configure it, there is a steep learning curve. You don't just have to learn (or install) Vagrant, but also Virtualbox, Ansible and possibly some Vagrant plugins to keep boxes up to date.
• Support on Windows doesn't seem great. I'm a Mac guy, so it's been very difficult getting things to work as expected when a developer wants to work on Windows.
• Perhaps I didn't configure it correctly, but the default shared folders are not the best for performance. There are also frequently weird issues regarding file permissions.

Incentivized

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

Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.

Incentivized

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

A GUI would be nice for entry level users.

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 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

I liked lando better because lando seemed extremely easy to setup compared to other VM's and it seemed faster though that project was simpler. Virtualbox I ran on windows and it has a gui and has often been slow. The vagrant boxes I used did well but had slightly more problems than lando.

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.

• Vagrant is free - It requires a bit of extra technical knowledge in terms of setup, but since it costs nothing it's an excellent resource
• It can be time consuming to learn, but once you get a good handle on it you're in good shape.

Incentivized