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Cisco Hyperflex
January 17, 2022

Cisco Hyperflex

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco HyperFlex

We resold a variety of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions including Nutanix, HPE Simplivity, Cisco Hyperflex and others. Typically these are bought by customers who are looking for flexible in-house storage for their own private clouds running on a hypervisor like VMware. (I am ignoring the cloud extensions of these products for purposes of this review)
  • Hyperflex has a good handle on data redundancy.
  • Snapshots work well in VMware and provide added value beyond the traditional VMware snapshot.
  • Installation is straightforward.
  • Too much integration with Cisco UCS fabric interconnects is required, which makes the product most useful for customers who already have Cisco UCS. Options without fabric interconnects are limited.
  • Hyper-V integration is way behind (but to be fair I think that's true for most vendors in this space).
  • I don't have much to say about ROI; however, its ease of installation guarantees that the product will generally be installed quickly.
Compares favorably to Nutanix and SimpliVity. Nutanix however has been around longer and has a bigger feature set than Hyperflex, which is in Nutanix's favor. However, while Nutanix does everything, it doesn't always do everything well.

SimpliVity on the other hand tends to work well in environments where data redundancy and replication is the most important factor.
I haven't had an opportunity to test a Hyperflex deployment with Intersight yet (although I do like Intersight). In general, though, Hyperflex installation is pretty straightforward and compares well to other products in this space.

Installation is admittedly more complicated if you're installing into a Brownfield pair of fabric interconnects.
I can't comment on this in too much detail, as I used it working for a reseller. However, most of the day-to-day administration is done through the vSphere client, meaning that it's pretty transparent to VMware admins. I can't speak to the Hyper-V integration, as I haven't used that myself.
Intersight has been useful for my customers in terms of managing their hardware and service calls. There was an issue with hard drive firmware updates that customers needed to prevent data issues that Intersight users were able to clear up pretty quickly. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to use Intersight with Hyperflex extensively.
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.

Do you think Cisco HyperFlex delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco HyperFlex's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco HyperFlex live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco HyperFlex go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco HyperFlex again?

Yes

vSphere, Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
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.