Cisco Intersight vs. Progress Chef

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Intersight
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Intersight is an operations platform that helps IT operations teams control and automate Cisco UCS, converged, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Intersight consolidates and automates infrastructure lifecycle management from data centers to the edge in one solution delivered as-a-service.N/A
Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…N/A
Pricing
Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
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Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
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IBM Turbonomic
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Score 8.9 out of 10
Ansible
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(35 ratings)
8.9
(18 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.8
(8 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
9.9
(35 ratings)
7.7
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.3
(4 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.4
(1 ratings)
9.6
(5 ratings)
Professional Services
8.4
(2 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco IntersightProgress Chef
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
It is highly suited for an organisation pushing for a standardised and centralised configuration of settings using policies, profiles and templates. It is highly suited for customers used to legacy UMM that need to refresh their environment, but instead of deploying them in UMM (which is still possible), to take the time and effort to learn Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and IMM as well as familiarise themselves with the differences between UMM and IMM, and the issues in UMM which IMM addresses and improves upon. We deployed in UMM initially then transitioned to IMM with the transition too. I cannot think of a scenario where Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service would not be suited. Even for small-scale deployments, it provides significant benefits. Maybe if you come from another server vendor management environment, the learning curve may feel steep (e.g. many new concepts and constructs that one has to master).
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Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
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Pros
Cisco
  • Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
  • Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
  • Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
  • Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).
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Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
  • We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
  • Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.
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Cons
Cisco
  • It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
  • If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
  • It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
  • It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
  • UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.
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Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
  • It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
  • Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
Very happy with the product. Also, without an Intersight Essentials license as a minimum, M7 servers and up cannot be managed
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Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Usability
Cisco
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.)
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Progress Software Corporation
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
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Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Progress Software Corporation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
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Support Rating
Cisco
I have had servers TAC cases open for issues with Cisco Intersight. Some have yet to be resolved. One case that is still open is where the HCL status ( Hardware Compatibility List ) shows not validated when It should be. We have several servers that have the exact same hardware, OS, and the same firmware. One server will show the HCL is not validated but all others will
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Progress Software Corporation
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
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Online Training
Cisco
You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful
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Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cisco
Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers
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Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cisco
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.
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Progress Software Corporation
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Progress Software Corporation
The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
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Professional Services
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Progress Software Corporation
The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • The negative thing is that we prefer to use the UCS Manager in our company because this bare metal is integrated into the FI and no extra appliance is required. SaaS is generally not viewed favorably in Germany.
  • Telling the user that they have to buy Intersight licenses even if they use UCS Manager annoys our customers.
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Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
  • One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
  • Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.
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ScreenShots

Cisco Intersight Screenshots

Screenshot of the Intersight dashboard, which provides out-of-the box summaries of real-time health and performance data across data center and edge infrastructure. Users can customize the dashboard with a library of widgets to quickly see information that's most important to them.Screenshot of the security advisories and field notices that alert users about endpoint devices in their environment that are impacted along with recommended resolution.Screenshot of the Topology Views that let users quickly identify any UCS domain connectivity issues thorugh a visual representation.Screenshot of an example of the automated workflows that users can create, using Intersight's drag-and-drop workflow designer and library of tasks and workflows.Screenshot of an example of the aggregated and visualized metrics that are collected for fabric interconnects, chassis, and servers to monitor devices, optimize performance, identify bottlenecks, and proactively address any potential issues.