Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We are partners and integrators of HyperFlex and I am a company Deputy Operative Director of IT.

HyperFlex has benefited us because there are no additional storage requirements and it requires less effort from the server and services in general. 

This solution offers very good data protection and also provides system uptime availability more effectively than the majority of other servers. It can calculate the multiple failures that give better uptime on the nodes. It provides good performance. HyperFlex has great scalability opportunity. 

Every node has a storage controller VM that checks identity and I think that should be eliminated in order to optimize the resource utilized. I'd like to see the ability to integrate with HPE because SimpliVity has some backup-live features which are useful for us. Finally, some improvement to the documentation would be helpful. Expecting some improvements in restore point and failover mechanism. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

Cisco HyperFlex is stable. We faced some issues because it has single dependency on the caching disk, and when that goes down it all goes down. It has only happened once. That aside, it's a stellar solution.

The solution is robustly scalable

The customer support is very good. 

Positive

The implementation isn't too complex but there are some requirements, including pre-deployment which requires a lot of documentation and security such as security management, secured data, VM and the like. We used a local partner to assist with deployment. We have a team of six that were involved in the implementation and with data center maintenance.

We partnered with a SI team and our in-house team also worked equally.  

Organization can achieve a good value of ROI. It depends on organization to organization and also based on purposes. 

We have a three-year license with Cisco and it's a reasonable price. 

We had previously used converged networks and when we decided to move to a hyper-converged infrastructure we evaluated several solutions including Dell EMC and HPE SimpliVity. We checked several criteria including financial, features, technical issues, and availability. We found that the HyperFlex performance gave us added benefits so we went with that.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

Our primary use case of HyperFlex is for storage. We are customers of Cisco. 

The integration to the network is a great thing. It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network which is Cisco's new network topology. It improves the accessibility of the data on HyperFlex, on their storage. It's similar to V-Storage on VMware and it integrates very well with the network.

I'd like to see easier integration with other vendors. For example, it wasn't that easy to integrate with VMware initially but eventually it worked. Ideally, I'd like to see the option of integrating with those devices on cloud, to use storage from our on-prem in a bucket in the cloud. We haven't yet seen any documentation regarding that. We need to find a way to share resources between on-prem and cloud.

We've had this solution implemented for five years. 

Initially, HyperFlex wasn't so stable but from the last update, it's been very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

The initial setup is not so straightforward, but as soon as it's set up, it's easy to integrate with other things. We generally deploy in-house with some assistance from Cisco. When we initially implemented, the deployment took a while because it was new to us, and new to the market. In particular, the integration to VMware wasn't easy, but since then, it has been very smooth. The entire company uses this solution.

I would recommend this product, I think it's a good device to use. It's not for medium-sized businesses, more for enterprise-level. The integration with VMware is fairly easy and smooth nowadays; it's fairly stable and scalable. It's a good product to try out. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Our use case was to set up a new VDI farm.

If you set up a cluster and then you decide a bit later on to split that resource into several smaller clusters, that's where UCS comes in and eases that operation better than anyone else that I've worked with. It provides better capacity utilization and a faster time to delivery. The cluster-splitting took about two hours while before, it took about four days. That's a considerable time savings in down-scaling and cluster spitting.

There are two most valuable features in HyperFlex:

• The UCS, which is by far the best management tool there is on the market, regardless of vendor. It's the only tool I see that gives you the opportunity to size and scale all the assets and capacity you have in your data center, from a unified view.
• That Cisco provides the ability to configure BIOS, something that no one else can do, on a remote basis. That's really helpful sometimes. The bus-snooping alteration tool for BIOS is fantastic. That's one of the game-changing features that Cisco alone has at this point.

In addition, the density, how much performance you can pack into the form factor, that is most impressive for me.

Finally, there's no high learning curve. It's very easy. Sure, you should have some experience, of course. But it's not that hard to get familiar with the user interface and how to manage and operate it.

It's extremely stable.

The scalability is fantastic; I'm close to saying matchless. I've forgotten how many physical nodes were involved, but it was a substantial installation. Really large. It had the capacity to host 16,000 concurrent users. That's pretty sizable.

I haven't experienced Cisco tech support in person, since it all went smoothly. We didn't have any problems.

They were using Dell EMC VxRail. They didn't switch, really. Cisco's presence just started to increase.

I found the setup to be relatively straightforward, but I have some 20 years in the business, so that could be a factor.

The deployment took two days. The company is a VMware house, so all things come to VMware. So maybe that eased things too. But you have to have Cisco-Certified engineers mounting the stuff.

The implementation of HyperFlex required six people, including the server manager, me, and two guys from Tech Mahindra taking care of the VMware parts. And there were two Cisco-Certified engineers from a big partner in this region, named Atea.

They missed some tables in the delivery and that took us an extra day. But I don't think that's mandatory procedure. Overall, the implementation went very smoothly.

For maintenance it takes four people on a day-to-day basis with specified, divided roles. including some taking care of the VMware parts while I take care of the VDI-specific features. I would consider it a high-maintenance solution. It's not that it takes full-time support, not from that perspective, but you have to be pretty well skilled in software, setting up profiles, etc. That's not Cisco-specific.

I have had a really good and long experience with Atea as a partner. 

This was my first acquaintance, in person, with Tech Mahindra and that was pretty interesting. You have to be somewhat aware of the caste system. It eases your dialogue.

ROI can be found in down-scaling time, which includes cluster-splitting, and the overall management, with the ease of UCS, compared to any other tool in that space.

It's hard to say there's a financial value since they're quite expensive. It's also a matter of OpEx and CapEx. Perhaps you pay up a little bit more, but to OpEx and CapEx will be lowered since the solution lasts forever and is easier to manage.

They are not the cheapest on the market. But there's an old saying I like to quote: "If you know that you are getting what you pay for, it's fine if it's expensive."

We compared two quotes. The other quote was from another big OEM, which is very closely tied to VMware. I was assigned to do that comparison since I have somewhat of a reputation as being good in sizing up the component base. I soon found out that the Cisco solution provided much higher density for the form factor than the other. Also, the server manager got a good feeling about the UCS by itself and the density. They were really good staff to work with and they have a high presence in the region. And they're really great in costumer care.

I know Cisco is working pretty hard to become a top player in the AI space. But I don't think Cisco has many competitors. There is Dell EMC and maybe Supermicro, which is always first on the market with all things new. Cisco is definitely one of the top three vendors.

Amulet Hotkey has some really nice products out there too. It's truly expensive if you want to go full frontal with everything that they offer. On the other hand, you can get there with almost the same, extremely high security level with Cisco products too.

Look at the manageability. Do a serious comparison of management tools. That's strong advice because it can be really expensive too if you have to implement a third-party management tool.

In terms of extent of use, Cisco systems make up about 30 percent of the overall system, but it was definitely the plan to increase Cisco systems within the data center, meaning HyperFlex, because of the form factor and the density of it.

Our workload is very heavy. We always acquire support from the tech engineer from Cisco, and they are always there for assistance and provide us the necessary health and guidance. In our environment, we manage to patch our infrastructure regularly, and we don't want to miss any patches. This sometimes it requires a lot of effort, and sometimes the updates are not recommended, and we have to wait for the recommended version. The patch management can impact us in our scope. This helps us centralize everything to make things easier. 

One of the major features of HX is that you have the replication factor, and you have the option to copy your data - and not just once. You also have the option to copy it twice or even get a third copy. It depends on the RF while deploying the checks. This is one of the great benefits. That way, if there is a major outage and you lose one of the nodes, you still have your data, and the data store is up and running, and your service won't be impacted. This is very beneficial for our company as we own a service that should be up and running 24/7. It's related to one of the government sectors, and it's very critical to have it always up and to avoid any downtime.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

It's stable.

We can easily scale the solution. 

The port could be improved. They have a robo port and can build a cluster with two nodes. This one needs a bit more focus. They need to provide us with more advice or maybe some documentation or some instructions for best practices, so we can leverage it effectively. 

They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands. Right now, if we can't find what we need, we need to raise a ticket or send an email. Sometimes we don't have that time to wait for the ticket or the case to be assigned. We should just have access to information about the CLI and various commands.

I've been using the HX for almost three years.

It's a stable solution. Sometimes we face an issue regarding the hard disk. We might find that it's unhealthy and must be replaced by Cisco. This can be easily monitored. 

It's a scalable solution. 

You can upgrade or add many hard disks so the business can keep continuity and scalability. It's also based on your business scope. We have ten branches. The ten branches are variants between the HX nodes. Some of them have ten hard disks, and some of them do not. Some of them have more. In any case, we find it very simple to scale where needed. 

We have six system administrators working directly with the solution.

I'm not sure if there is a plan to increase usage just yet.  

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up. Once you choose the cluster mode that you want to go through, you can put in all the IPs, and HX will start to build the clusters across the nodes. While it's a little bit complex at the beginning, when you get used to it, it's simple.

We have two people available to maintain the solution once it is deployed. 

We have a partner for support, and they do most of the work. We do a bit ourselves in-house as well. Some of us on the interior team have an HX certification and have strong knowledge of the solution. I'm working to be certified myself right now. 

We have seen an ROI while using this product. 

I'm not aware of the exact costs of the solution. 

We looked at VxRail from Dell and Nutanix. We chose Cisco as we use Cisco a lot in our company.

I would suggest new users read the documentation very well and prepare an action plan based on their design. They have to address all the possibilities and have a rollback plan in case something goes wrong. These points must be addressed. For beginners or some people who don't have this knowledge, they must consult a third party who has this knowledge to ensure they have done it correctly to avoid lengthy troubleshooting or any other issues.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

This solution is used for branch office servers.

Instead of having to go to multiple vendors to deploy a solution, it's just one place where we have everything that we need to set up and go.

The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers.

Having this solution even easier to manage would be nice.

The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running. I would like to have less clicking to deploy it, where it is ready to go out of the box with a default build. That would make things a little faster.

This solution was not stable when we originally implemented it. However, over the last eighteen months or so, the updates have made it stable and actually usable for us.

It definitely looks like it keeps scaling. We're not doing huge deployments of it, but it looks like it's easy to keep adding on to what we have.

Technical support for this solution is very good.

The initial setup was complex, but it was done more than eighteen months ago in the old form of things. It was a little harder than it is now.

We handle the implementation and deployment in-house.

We currently have a perpetual license, which is kind of unlimited, so we don't have the normal licensing cost, yet.

We purchased both this solution and one from Nutanix to compare them.

This solution allows us to get up and running a lot faster than before. Instead of it being multiple days of cabling, multiple solutions, and getting the servers online, it now generally takes one full day to get it up and ready to go.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It’s a part of a public sector bid we're preparing. The HyperFlex platform has been discontinued. It's mainly used for enterprise-grade applications like databases, CRP systems, and typical enterprise workloads.

It is a one-stop solution. It's easy to get the tool started.

The product doesn’t exist anymore. It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations. That is why the vendor discontinued the tool.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. Five or six customers use the on-premise solution.

The technical support is quite nice. We are Cisco Gold Partners. It’s easy for us to find our way with Cisco.

The tool is easy to set up in general.

We don’t need developers to deploy the product, but we need professional services, including a team of five engineers. We also have an internal team of another six engineers.

It's always a pain to work with Cisco on licensing. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. The product could be cheaper.

I’m an integrator. My organization sells the solution. There’s no point recommending something that has gone out of sale. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for non-production purposes like development, testing, etc.

The database and deduplication features are what I like the most. On a storage level, the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is managed well. These features can be used for specific applications, such as the Oracle database, or general purposes.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could be improved by reducing the number of nodes. Currently, the architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts. For example, if I need around 200 servers with a requirement of TB of storage, I would need 200 clusters, which can be quite cumbersome.

Other solutions like Dell and Nutanix have a single combined unit that includes computing, memory, and storage, which can reduce the number of nodes required and also reduce licensing and power consumption.

Therefore, I suggest improving the architecture of the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series by combining computing, memory, and storage into a single unit, making it more efficient and easier to manage. It will also reduce the number of nodes required and licensing costs and help to reduce power consumption.

I would like to see improved internal integration capabilities in the next release. Currently, it is constrained only to VMware only. So, there is no integration part of the RAC or IEL or anything, and it isn't easy to manage it. If I want to hold another partner, then that part will not be possible. So, you have to manage that particular integration.

Another feature could be in terms of memory usage.

I have been using this solution for the last five years. We are using the latest version.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I would rate scalability a six out of ten. It has some issues with scalability.

The customer service guy supported me well.

Positive

We had a physical environment with Cisco, and virtualization began in that environment. We were using a Dell environment where all the personal data was standalone with the servers.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment was straightforward and took around a month due to the 58 nodes. Once the drive was implemented, the deployment was completed. While they are not direct users of the solution, the infrastructure supports over 1000 users in our IT department. However, maintenance requires a team because hardware issues might need to be addressed. There are four to five people responsible for maintenance.

I have a yearly subscription.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. It may require a significant initial investment to set up the infrastructure.

The primary use we have for this product is to act as a server and for storage.

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to manage.

Another valuable feature is the fact that you can individually upgrade the specific parts of the product. Compared to other products like SimpliVity, or Nutanix you have to upgrade the whole node if you want to expand memory or storage. In HyperFlex, you can actually upgrade at will. If you want to upgrade your memory cloud, you upgrade it. So that is a big advantage I've seen from any hyper-convergence product. VxRail or Nutanix and products like that are not as flexible and that is the biggest reason we chose this solution.

I think the product can improve dramatically in the area of deduplication. With deduplication as it is, you have 30 or 40% of the storage that can't be used because the deduplication is not efficient enough. I hope they fix that problem.

The stability of the solution has never been a problem. I would say it is excellent.

I think the scalability of the solution is excellent. Because you can upgrade individual pieces without upgrading a whole node. The problem for other solutions is that if you want a hard drive or you want additional storage or you want memory, you have to make a bigger investment in hardware and time. So, scalability's excellent.

Our experience with Cisco support and products is always very good.

Through conferences and other research, we became aware that there were products which would serve our needs better. Previously, we needed a dedicated storage person to do storage, a dedicated BMR (Bare Metal Restore) person to do BMR. Now, one person can do both because you spend a lot less time with either. So that is the reason we looked at hyper-convergence and this product.

The initial setup was very straightforward compared to categorical peers. If you compare it with other products, it's straightforward. But when you consider hyper-convergence itself, it is not straightforward. I am technical and I have technical team, otherwise it might have been hard. But for our cumulative experience and looking at implementing products like Nutanix — or some other similar products — it's straightforward.

We used Cisco themselves as the vendor. They were very good at implementing the solution.

Return on investment is really immediate and substantial. In a traditional EMC storage environment, we needed to assign a full-time person to maintain storage. With this solution, our ROI is allowing one full-time person to maintain more because it is easier. You can say, basically, that you're gaining a full-time person to do something else for the same cost.

My advice about the product is simply that it's not cheap. If you have budget limitations it is best to look elsewhere.

We did consider other products like Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, and another company.

We had EMC VNX storage, BMR and such. Hyper-convergence made more sense. The big thing for us was being able to easily manage the product.

I can safely rate this product as an eight out of ten. This is because it's scalable and you can upgrade it as if you are upgrading a server. In any other solution with hyper-convergence, you can't do that, so you've got to buy a node part to upgrade memory. 

Anyone considering this solution should define their requirements. It's not a solution for everybody. If you're using a lot of storage, hyper-convergence might not be good for you. We don't have a lot of storage, so it is a functional and desirable solution for us. If you have much greater storage needs, it may not be a good solution.