Cisco Intersight vs Chef Infra

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

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 5001-10,000 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

View all 18 answers on this topic

Pros

Accessible from anywhere online.
Cisco is always adding new functionality.
Easy to learn and use on a daily basis.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees

View all 18 answers on this topic

Cons

Mobile app has some minor display issues.
Most exciting features are still being rolled out.

Read full review

Wouter Hindriks

Technical Team Lead Network & Security

Missing Piece BVInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employees

View all 18 answers on this topic

Likelihood to Renew

Cisco Intersight 8.2

Based on 1 answer

Basic version is free, good functionality now and many interesting things on the roadmap.

Read full review

Wouter Hindriks

Technical Team Lead Network & Security

Missing Piece BVInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Performance

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Chef Infra 9.4

Based on 10 answers

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.

Read full review

Christopher Maggiulli

Enterprise Software Architect

Latham Pool Products IncBuilding Materials, 1001-5000 employees

View all 10 answers on this topic

Support Rating

Cisco Intersight 8.2

Based on 4 answers

Because Cisco is actively developing Cisco Intersight.
Because Cisco listens to users of Cisco Intersight and actively develops suggestions and fix issues found.

Read full review

Joacim Wicander

Senior Data Center Engineer

Conscia Sweden ABInformation Technology & Services, 51-200 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

Chef Infra 7.0

Based on 5 answers

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

View all 5 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

We use the Dell OpenManage product previously when we were using Dell servers. Cisco Intersight has much more capabilities than Dell OpenManage had in the past. I haven't used any other product lately which would allow me to compare the features. We use What's up gold for up/down monitoring but It doesn't have the firmware update features.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 5001-10,000 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Rob Ericsson

Senior Vice President Of Product Development

RizingInformation Technology & Services, 501-1000 employees

View all 18 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

Basic Intersight access is free to all Cisco customers.
You can decide what level of functionality fits your needs and budget.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

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.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 18 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No