Cisco Intersight

Uptime is very important for current data centers addition to simplifying support, ensuring compliance and improving security of data center networks. Cisco Intersight covers these in a single GUI dashboard. This tool is very useful in current VXLAN, Cisco ACI deployed data centers where visibility is important and sometimes users and administrators feel new architectures lack of traditional visibility tools where intersight could help.

The ease of configuring the SAAS application, and no need to have an appliance on-prem.

I enjoy the single pane view across multiple datacenters.

Being able to keep an eye on our data center from anywhere is very nice. The modern GUI is easy to use and understand. I don't mind working within the Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and find it easier than some other server manufacturers. If you have stand-alone UCS C servers or UCS blade servers you can have both within Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service. Older models work with it as well.

Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is good for data center management and automation

Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is a cloud-based management and automation platform that provides centralized monitoring, management, and optimization of infrastructure across hybrid cloud environments. Some of the key features and benefits of Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service are: 1. Automation: Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service automates repetitive tasks like firmware updates, policy configurations, and alerts to make system management more efficient. 2. Proactive support: Advanced analytics built into Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service help to identify issues before they become problems and provide proactive support to minimize downtime. 3. Centralized management: The platform provides a single dashboard for managing both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, simplifying management across hybrid cloud environments. 4. AI-driven insights: Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service uses AI-driven insights to provide actionable recommendations on how to optimize infrastructure and improve performance. 5. Integration with third-party tools: The platform integrates with other Cisco tools like ACI, UCS, and HyperFlex, as well as third-party tools like Ansible and Terraform. 6. Cloud-based: As a cloud-based management platform, Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service enables IT teams to manage and optimize infrastructure from anywhere, at any time. 7. Agile management: Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service provides agile management across the full stack of infrastructure, from servers to storage to virtual machines. Overall, Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service helps IT teams optimize and automate infrastructure management, improve performance, minimize downtime, and ultimately enable greater business agility in hybrid cloud environments.

In my opinion, it is not a full management tool and lacks the full functionality of UCS Central. However, Cisco Intersight is evolving quickly and it's still to be determined what exactly it is trying to achieve and replace. It complements UCS Central well and has some added benefits, but is still not a necessary investment for us yet, just a complimentary one at the moment.

If you have Cisco UCS then Intersight is a must. If you also have a supported storage and supported virtualization platform you are going to make the most use of the features it offers. It really simplifies management, and configuration via orchestration. It also keeps you informed of security vulnerabilities regarding your infrastructure.

Intersight works well for us in the sense that our Hyperflex deployments are easy to manage and maintain. Time will tell how well it works for managing our datacenters with the 6400 series FIs and doing away with on-premise UCSM.

With the ability to easily configure and manage multiple UCS-X platforms across different locations.
Where you want the ability to leverage profiles and automation to assist with creating a consistent and standard platform across all of your environments.
Where you are wanting the ability to be able to see not only your compute, but GPU, Network, and Storage for your data center in a single platform.
Where you are looking at optimizing your workload across your on-premise environment and cloud environments.

Small teams managing large amounts of infrastructure will love the single pane of glass and almost installation-free setup. UCS Central is a bear and to get that functionality out of the box is a big win. Small teams will appreciate the ease of use.

For me as a consultant with many customers running Cisco Servers in their DC, Cisco Intersight helps me and the customer to install/maintain and troubleshoot these servers without me being on-site or via VPN. The connected TAC functionality is the best part of Cisco Intersight today. You can directly from Intersight create a TAC case and the upload of the tech support files is done automatically so we don't have to do this manually. This is not only for Cisco Servers anymore—I learned this last week—but you can use it for Cisco ACI, and the upload of the tech support files if/when you are creating TAC cases. This requires Cisco ACI version 4.2

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.

We often have memory sticks that stop working because we have many servers with over 2TB or RAM and thanks to intersight each time there is a memory failure, the replacement stick is on its way far before the case starts to be investigated on our side, this is especially useful when a failure happens at night

Cisco Intersight is very good for beginner users who are not going to make any changes to HyperFlex or Cisco UCS. If you are an experienced user, Intersight is only for after the configuration is complete and you can hand it off to less experienced people.

It is very good if you have lots of Cisco Servers and lots of Cisco blade chasis. It is not so good for just 1 blade chasis or just a few servers.

It is a great tool to simplify log collection through the Cisco Connected TAC center. Proactive RMA is also a nice feature that can greatly reduce the time that is needed to finish the RMA process. Cisco Security Advisories, Field Notices, EoL Advisories Acknowledged advisories, and field notices are also available for all devices connected to Intersight.

IT, research, inventory. It could be well suited almost anywhere except home, but the support is really good, so it's easy to make it work anywhere. The VMs are particularly helpful in my field of research, and many tedious or mundane tasks are made super easy on this platform. It does what it aims to do well and more!

It is well suited for environments where applications are crucial to be up the most time possible. If you are running web services app and you want to monitor resources and automate tasks like assign CPU and RAM to specific VM this is for you. I think scenarios where it is less appropriate should be scenarios where you have standalone severs and these are saturated with VM that if you decrease the RAM or CPU to add it to another one would cause a disaster, but the advantage is the remote monitoring from everywhere.

Businesses with a homogeneous environment of Cisco devices can quickly enable cloud-based monitoring. Smaller footprints may find Cisco Intersight to be cost competitive compared to other enterprise class solutions. The cost to monitor large environments can be free (basic licenses) or if advanced features are required; other solutions may provide more value for the cost.

Central management of our infrastructure.

We use Cisco Intersight to take a look in the morning for errors or problems and for forecasting storage usage by example. So we use it for monitoring mostly. Cisco Intersight is able to deploy Hyperflex Clusters or configure UCS managers and servers, but we do not use this by now.

If you use Cisco equipment (networking and computing) it's a no-brainer as it helps you keep all your equipment in line and up to date and best of all the free tier is already pretty good!

Intersight is constantly evolving over the past few years, and Cisco continues to make the platform more useful. The only caveat is that Intersight requires connectivity to the internet, either directly or via a proxy appliance. If your organization's security posture does not allow connectivity, there is no locally deployable alternative option.

If you have a UCS/Hyperflex environment connect it to Cisco Intersight and you can judge for yourself if it's adding value for you.