Cisco HyperFlex

Cisco HyperFlex is great in XaaS environments that need to expand and shrink depending upon demand. The movement of Service Profiles between blades provides uptime stability during hardware failures or troubleshooting.

Cisco Support is very knowledgeable from the start. The CE's are also very knowledgeable, which helps when replacing hardware. The Cisco KB Articles are well written and extensive.

The product that complies with everything offered, so I would buy it again. In the company, we are all satisfied. We know that with the modernization of our infrastructure we achieve a better result in the application and administration of data center environments, optimizing operations in distributed environments is also possible, it is important to know that for a better operation, more than three nodes are implemented to increase range.

The answer to problems in node configuration is to improve the critical workload which is always technical support, this is what makes HyperFlex the best product, when a product is difficult to use it should always have a good technical help system like offered by Cisco.

Best suited for medium to great scale Virtual infrastructure with a plan for growth and expansion.

The response is quick and they manage the case as a high priority.

with the 4.5 version in place, the product is matured but needs some improvement stretched cluster upgrade procedure ( changes to witness VM upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 is not clear and some of the validation steps are so confusing.

Cisco does collaborative support with other vendors (like one ticket is raised to resolve even if it is a VMware issue)

Smaller-scale implementations. It seems to have challenges when you have a lot of nodes in a cluster. SSD storage performs well. If you do have performance issues, they can be very difficult to find. We spent months trying to figure out why copying VMs from other clusters to one specific cluster took so long. Never did figure it out by the time I left the company.

Great support in most areas, but very difficult to get resolutions for odd performance problems.

Cisco HyperFlex is well suited if you are looking for agile, efficient, and Hybrid IT infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex exclusively supports Hyperconverged Infrastructure, so we can gain agile, efficient, and quick deployment. If you are looking to reduce the power and cooling costs, then it's the ultimate solution to avail. When comes to any software supporting the business with high efficiency and speed is important and these can be achieved by HyperFlex. As it is Hybrid infrastructure will be able to manage everything in one place and we can eliminate the extra costs spent for buying other physical disks.

Nowadays being agile and efficient is most really important. Hyperflex has the ability to be agile and efficient. Cisco HyperFlex functions based on UCS technology, it includes built-in networking and integrated management with pre-configured software. Cisco HyperFlex has everything in one place as a data center, so there is no need to focus on extra things.

Hyperflex is best for customers who already have Cisco UCS because of its integration with UCS fabric interconnects. You can add UCS blades to your Hyperflex cluster to increase compute capacity without increasing storage--which is great depending on your needs--but it's still limited to UCS. Installations without fabric interconnects have been limited in scope and most importantly expandability.

I like that it doesn't require data locality. While I've used Nutanix extensively and SimpliVity to a less extent, I'm not as sold on their use of it. On the one hand your reads are faster if they're all from the node currently running a VM, but it also means your data has to move around if you vmotion your VMs.

I do feel that Cisco has been playing catchup for a few years now with Nutanix, but Hyperflex has become a decent product that I would recommend to my customers where it's a good fit. However, I recommend being careful to make sure that it has all the features you need.

More documentation is available now than when the product initially came out (which was an issue early on). Because it only supports UCS hardware, I think it does help with support issues. Nutanix has to support much more hardware. At the same time, you're dealing with the Cisco TAC, which can be mixed at times.

Cisco HyperFlex is well suited for small to medium virtualization environments.

Have had to open several cases during Cisco HyperFlex setup and cluster expansion. Support was able to assist and rectify all issues.

Automatic hardware health monitoring created an RMA to replace the hard drive when I didn't even know there was a problem. And I only found out about the problem when I received the package with the new hard drive and the replacement instructions.

Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.

If an all-in-one solution is required, Cisco HyperFlex is ideal. Perfect for medium and large companies that require scalability for the solution, since Cisco HyperFlex allows increasing nodes only for storage or processing and memory, as required. I do not recommend it for small companies that are starting because the price can be high.

Support with Cisco depends a lot on the type of contract you have, which is something to consider when purchasing the Cisco HyperFlex solution. In most cases, the resolution time for problems is good, although there are times that it may take longer than expected depending on the problem that arises and the expertise of the engineer who is attending to the problem. Regarding hardware replacement, response times are punctual, according to the policy contract.

HyperFlex is great option if you are looking for a high performance and reliable hyper-converged platform. We do not have to spend a great deal of time with administration of the platform, and can easily monitor the system health via Cisco Intersight.
We are still investigating the evolving stretch cluster capabilities, and have not fully vetted those capabilities to replace our existing converged virtual infrastructure yet.

Cisco support has always resolved any issues promptly, and the auto-support option for HyperFlex allows even faster resolution if there are hardware failures and components need to be replaced.

If you require an all-in-one setup, Cisco HyperFlex is the perfect solution. The 24 drive bays and 18 memory slots per box make these boxes well suited for a virtual environment with very low required cabinet space. Any company could benefit from the use of Cisco HyperFlex. I would not recommend it for a small business or anyone with limited Cisco knowledge; the UI can be quite overwhelming with all of the features.

Cisco HyperFlex engineers are great to work with. I have completely destroyed the environment twice and they were able to get me back up and running with ease. Granted, it took 26 solid hours each time to resolve the issues, but I did not suffer a total loss and was back up before everyone showed up on campus the next morning. Support will help you in your time of need; they know the systems and will work with you as long as possible.

It suited for DevOps and production environments. Cisco provides native Kubernetes support on Hyperflex. In other words, we can utilize Hyperflex for VM and Container deployment on the same platform. Hyperflex supports persistent volume for the container. With these features, we deployed VM for production and Kubernetes for testing purposes.

Single point of contact for server, storage and network problems.

Great for both private and hybrid cloud environments. Can support both general virtualized workloads and specific workloads (including SAP HANA). Strong hyperconverged offering which solves a lot of issues you have with other solutions by providing a complete solution including network and bespoke hypervisor images.

Support is good for critical issues, but not as fast as I'd like for lower severity issues. Reaction times are slow. Often, you're better off finding your own solution than waiting for TAC.

We have quite a big data store covered up with our HyperFlex solution, it's well suited for bigger structures with importance in redundant systems. For smaller needs, there is an option to use the HX Edge, without the FIs. If you use VMware it’s well integrated, the same goes for an ACI structure. But I’m not quite sure if all features work that well with Hyper-V.

In one case there was quite a slow to get a server fixed - but it was well made in the end (to be honest, it was not fully support's fault). in any other case it was perfect.

It really depends on the use case you plan to have. For us, it is good for small deployment solutions. For DC, we still prefer a UCS plain solution.

We work with our partners to have efficient relations and talk to Cisco to get RFE.

Highly virtualized environments are best managed with HyperFlex.

Cisco support is always ready to help, but it does depend on the representative you get when you call.

We have a varied workload (as mentioned earlier, right from SQL and NoSQL databases, VDI, Microsoft Exchange, SAP Oracle, Cloud Foundry etc. etc.) and for all our types of work, we've found HX absolutely stable in all aspects. HX finds great suitability if you are looking for creating a data centre with a high level of availability (stretched cluster - that too with just 2 nodes per data centre). Not only are we early adopters of HX, but since its implementation we have shared our success stories with many customers of ours, as well as in the reference calls from Cisco. Those who adopted HX on our reference have shared very good feedback.