A promising Solution and you never regret [it].
August 31, 2021

A promising Solution and you never regret [it].

Jeeva Kumar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
  • Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco UCS Series

We are using Cisco UCS B Series for the Production client-facing environment and a very small portion of the same series on non Production environment. The VMware Hyper-Visor is running on bare metal hosting several virtual machines. It's been for almost 7 years we have been using this and it boosted our up-time as we didn't have any issues while it's running or even during any kind of firmware upgrades.
  • [It's] easy to manage and configure all the chassis and blades using the UCS manager.
  • Upgrading the firmware, VMware driver on Cisco UCS is very straight forward.
  • Uptime. We never had a situation where the server had crashed.
  • [The] initial investment was very expensive unless Cisco provides a good deal compared to their competitors.
  • Increase the hardware EOL and support for min 10 years.
  • Very expensive to upgrade the Memory as Cisco recommends not to use the third-party product as it voids the warranty.
  • Up-time is always the priority.
  • As and when the vulnerabilities are identified, the patches were available from Cisco.
  • We did had a good ROI but its still the CAP-ex is expensive.
We do have a Cisco C service server, but that was never configured in a production environment as it was solely used for R&D purposes. Cisco UCS [Series] is very compact with easy to install. 8 Full and 16 half fits in 1 chassis and [it] is very easy to upgrade both vertically and horizontally. We were also able to expand the number of virtual machines growing vertically by adding additional RAM on all the blades without even investing in additional chassis or blades.
The chassis that we use supports 8x10GB=80 GB bandwidth per IOM module with a total of 160 GB. There is no doubt the Cisco Blades offers very good performance, bandwidth, and latency. Having said that, customer satisfaction can always be achieved if we have a good uptime of the application by having a rock-solid redundant backend infrastructure. With 2 Fabric interconnect, all the chassis are cross-connected balancing equally down to virtualization and thus we were able to achieve 100% uptime in the last 7 years. This is a great accomplishment so far.
The beauty of the Cisco UCS Manager is that all the configurations can be driven from a common global template and customization can be done on the specific service profile thus by calling the policies from the various policy template. Whether it's an ISCSI or SAN requirement, the configuration is very user-friendly. All the VLAN's for Vmware virtualization can be defined in the Cisco UCS Manager and then it can be seamlessly configured in the ESXi.

Do you think Cisco UCS Series delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Cisco UCS Series's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco UCS Series live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco UCS Series go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco UCS Series again?

Yes

Except for the pricing, which can be further negotiated, sometimes Cisco provides additional addons for free of cost which is a cost-benefit. We have been running the production and UAT environment for almost 7 years and never experienced any issues related to the hardware. The upgrade of the firmware takes a reasonable amount of time depending on the number of chassis, servers, and importantly the load of the virtualization platform as the time depends on how quickly the Virtual machines are freed from the host for the upgrade. The firmware upgrade is a smooth process that starts from the Fabric Interconnect and moves down to the chassis and blades.