Cisco Intersight vs Chef Infra | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 31 reviews and ratings

Score 8.2 out of 10

Based on 47 reviews and ratings

Attribute Ratings

Cisco Intersight is rated higher in 2 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Support Rating

Likelihood to Recommend

8.2

Cisco Intersight

82%

12 Ratings

8.1

Chef Infra

81%

18 Ratings

Likelihood to Renew

9.0

Cisco Intersight

90%

2 Ratings

Chef Infra

N/A

0 Ratings

Usability

9.1

Cisco Intersight

91%

1 Rating

Chef Infra

N/A

0 Ratings

Performance

Cisco Intersight

N/A

0 Ratings

9.4

Chef Infra

94%

10 Ratings

Support Rating

7.7

Cisco Intersight

77%

12 Ratings

7.2

Chef Infra

72%

5 Ratings

Pros

Intersight can consolidate Infra management on a single dashboard such as UCS Server, Hyperflex, Fabric Interconnect, UCSM.
Device policy and configuration can be deployed from Intersight.
Firmware and software upgrade for all devices can be done from Intersight.
No impact to DC production if Intersight connection is interrupted.
Apps workload data is not passed through Intersight, only the control plane.
TAC can be opened via Intersight.

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Solution Architect

Sisindokom LintasbuanaInformation Technology & Services, 201-500 employees

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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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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees

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Cons

The cost is a little high per trackable asset
Mobile application is missing some features
Automatic TAC case creation doesn't always work as advertised

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Senior Network Administrator

University HealthSystem ConsortiumHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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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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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

—

Likelihood to Renew

Cisco Intersight 9.0

Based on 2 answers

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

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Benjamin Bubbers

Systems Engineer

Schleswig-Holstein Netz AGOil & Energy, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Usability

Cisco Intersight 9.1

Based on 1 answer

everything works well and is really useful

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Benjamin Bubbers

Systems Engineer

Schleswig-Holstein Netz AGOil & Energy, 1001-5000 employees

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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.

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Christopher Maggiulli

Enterprise Software Architect

Latham Pool Products IncBuilding Materials, 1001-5000 employees

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Support Rating

Cisco Intersight 7.7

Based on 12 answers

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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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Chef Infra 7.2

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.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Cisco Intersight makes device management easy by automatically detecting the parameters that need to be monitored, so you can save time registering each device. In addition, thanks to its mobile application, you can know most of the time if an incident occurs due to the active alerting of the application.

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IT Engineer

Best Day Travel GroupLeisure, Travel & Tourism, 501-1000 employees

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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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Senior Vice President Of Product Development

RizingInformation Technology & Services, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

As a Cisco partner and vendor, it allows us to monitor and give proactive support to our customers in a way that was impossible before.
Also gives proactive and predictive support from cisco since it allows for automatic case creation with cisco in case that a problem is detected in the infrastructure.

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Ingeniero de Soporte e Implementacion

Pracso ServicesInformation Technology & Services, 11-50 employees

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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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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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