UCS B-servers: An excellent workhorse for your datacenter.
Updated September 04, 2020
UCS B-servers: An excellent workhorse for your datacenter.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco UCS Series
We have moved our entire virtual environment (~1000 virtual servers) to Cisco UCS B servers. We have 40 physicals blades which provide all the computing power. For our customers, we host a virtual desktop environment complete with application servers, E-mail server, and file/print servers. We have stopped using all other vendors' servers because of the great scalability and ease of maintenance of our UCS environment.
- Easy to manage, all operations from provisioning servers to firmware maintenance can be done from the UCS manager.
- Easy to scale, since all intelligence resides at the Fabric Interconnect level, adding more servers is just a case of sliding in more blades, and deploy existing service profiles to provision the hardware with all the right config and firmware.
- Great documentation and technical support available.
- Initial setup is more involved than traditional servers.
- Slightly larger financial investment when starting your UCS environment because of the need to add the Fabric Interconnects.
- We can now scale up/out much easier because of UCS.
- Firmware maintenance is a matter of setting up the upgrade and letting the UCS manager perform all the work.
With HP Blade we had a management island for every enclosure. With the UCS manager, we have a single management pane for our entire UCS infrastructure. Which consists of both blade and rack servers.
Using Cisco UCS Series
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Use of UCS manager saves a lot of manual work when deploying your servers
- APIs enable integration with your other products
- It does take some reading to understand the UCS system.
- The scalability of the systems makes small deployments somewhat more work.
Yes - Using intersight you can access your UCS system from anywhere in the world without having to poke holes in your firewall. It gives you good at a glance health checks and will inform you of any issues on your environment.