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.
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Rackspace Fabric
Score 6.3 out of 10
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A solution to bring cloud security, billing, operations and management together. Rackspace Fabric offers a single platform for automated multicloud management. Service includes access to Rackspace cloud technology expertise, and provides a unified interface management for all cloud resources across Azure, AWS, GCP, and VMware, in a single, SaaS like operating environment.
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).
I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.
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).
Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.
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.
Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.
Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.
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.)
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
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.
I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.
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.
