Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We deployed HyperFlex for our website services, as well as we put our F5 on it. Basically, we use it for some applications, some better features.

The main value is it brings the total solution, so you don't need to worry about storage and also networking. It brings to you an all-in-one option. The good side is you don't need to worry about it. 

Support is very responsive.

If you need to expand, scalability is an issue. Overall, you can just call Cisco and then they will help you to fix everything.

The storage could be better. If you want to expand the storage, sometimes you need to expand the memory at the same time. This could be cumbersome or pricey.

The initial setup can be complex. 

I've used the solution since 2019.

In terms of stability, during the setup, there are a lot of issues, however, it's not really related to HyperFlex. It might be hardware issues. However, once fixed, you don't need to do any maintenance except upgrades. Once it's fixed, it is very smooth.

The scalability could be better. It doesn't have a big impact.

We have our customers using the solution. We have about one million customers. 

Support has been good. 

Every time we raise a case to Cisco, whenever there's an upgrade, if there are some tricks or some stuff that we do not understand, then they will probably come and help us fix the issue.

Neutral

It's a little bit difficult to set up the solution. It's not exactly straightforward. 

We've maintained it by ourselves. That said, for sure, if we need a support, then we would ask Cisco to help. In terms of maintenance, we have an external backup solution, so the backup is not quite related. For upgrades and updates, it's not quite frequent and it's not very complicated.

I do not handle any aspects of licensing. 

I don't have a solid figure. For the production part, I pass it to our operation team to continue the license purchase. However, for the lab, I maintain it. For the lab, I spent around $70,000 to $100,000 CAD per year for licensing and maintaining it.

I'm a customer. 

If the system is going to be a scalable product or scalable application, I would not recommend it to others. However, if it's more scalable deployment, then HyperFlex is a good solution. If it's a large-scale deployment, it is better to go for another option that can separate the storage, et cetera.

For our environment, I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Cisco HyperFlex HX is internal. We use it for internal hyper-converged. I post VMs for internal use and for customers.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions in the way that the time to deliver a VM takes me five minutes. In comparison, my cloud team's response is a couple of days based on all their overhead policies, procedures, and ticket requests. This is substantial.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is easy to use all across the board. I can do hyper-converged without being a storage guy. That's a big deal.

They should fix the upgrade process. The upgrade process is great. It is seamless 70% of the time, but when it doesn't work, it goes south. Cisco needs to fix some of those upgrade bugs and it will be a perfect solution. That would be good for somebody who doesn't want to spend a lot of time micromanaging the device in production.

It is very stable. I've been running one cluster since 2016 with no outages. I've got two other clusters that have been running flawlessly.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has got great scalability. Right now, they offer a potential scale that is well beyond my network requirements.

Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex.

We weren't using any previous solution. I was trying to redesign how we deployed services and tools to our customers. The only way to do that was with virtualization.  

I needed something like Cisco HyperFlex HX because I'm a network guy. I'm not a server or storage guy. I wasn't the VM guy. I needed something that I could support with very low maintenance and very few hands. Cisco HyperFlex HX has fulfilled that need greatly.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

For the deployment, we consulted with Cisco directly.

HyperFlex and Nutanix were the main two products that I looked at. The reason I eventually chose Cisco was cost and data center footprint. Nutanix was twice the physical footprint in the data center than HyperFlex.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product a solid nine because of the upgrade process. Everything we've been doing with it is blazing a new trail. 

We've been dramatically changing how we deliver the service. Not only am I changing how we deliver the service, but the tools team is changing the platform they're delivering it on too. It's all a new investment. There are not a lot of cost savings today that we can realize.

You can deploy Cisco HyperFlex HX with very little knowledge of UCS, hyper-converged, or storage. There is very little ramp-up time. UCS manager takes a little bit of getting used to. Cisco HyperFlex HX is a solid product. I can't steer people away from it.

The primary use case is to deploy all our production and documents. We have deployed Hyper-V on top of HyperFlex and the majority of our operation is on Hyper-V. Major workloads are our e-commerce website and applications that are hosted on it. We have deployed database servers and document management systems and a couple of app and web servers.

There is no specific storage person required for this solution. There are some slight cost advantages when you need fewer resources to manage it.

The fact that it's hyperconverged is what is most valuable about this solution. There is no specific feature which I can name because we have only been using it for a very short time. We just started using it.

It needs improvements in terms of I/O. Sometimes I have felt it is slightly slow while we are trying to provision VMs or access VMs. They should concentrate on that issue. At the same, time L2 switches are bundled in HyperFlex. If they make that the L3 switch, that would enhance the performance slightly better.

We deployed a couple of MySQL database servers and some portals which are connected and hosted outside on the internet and the deployment is still going well. So far it is stable and working fine. The deployment is still going on, the migration of further applications is happening.

Scaling, currently, is four nodes. Our plan is to add a couple of nodes next year.

So far, the technical support has been good, although we haven't faced many issues. While installing there were a couple of issues, otherwise everything has been fine and working normally.

This is the first hyperconverged solution we have used. We changed to HyperFlex because new requirements came in. Instead of moving towards a conventional infrastructure, we felt it was the time for us to look at, and to be involved with, the current trend in the market. These are the factors which made us look at this type of option.

The initial setup was very straightforward. After deploying the hardware, the engineer configured the HyperFlex software. On top of that, they gave us dashboard access where I could start deploying Hyper-V on those hosts and start provisioning VMs.

The deployment took a week. One person came from our Cisco partner. He understood our setup and planned what kind of support was required from our side. After providing the required information to him he started deploying the HyperFlex boxes.

It takes one person to maintain it after deployment. In our case he is a Windows administrator.

It was implemented by a Cisco partner from whom we got HyperFlex. Our experience with them has been good so far.

We negotiated with Cisco and we got some price benefit from that.

We looked at ScaleIO from Dell EMC and we also looked at Nutanix. We looked at those two options seriously. Finally, we settled on HyperFlex and we went with it. 

The one thing we clearly saw was that this was that this was what we need. ScaleIO was more a type of software-defined storage, but the hardware which is underlying it is not really tested or already satisfactory for optimized performance. HyperFlex is something that is designed to be hyperconverged and tested thoroughly, and was satisfactory for these operations. This was the decision-making point for us to go with the HyperFlex.

Go ahead and do it. It's a good product. Somebody with a similar environment and a similar experience should go ahead. But check thoroughly that fits your organization.

Our administration strategy is that one guy will be managing the complete dashboard. We are planning to see if there is automation where I can provide this through a DevOps tool. That's something I am looking at.

There is one main entity using it in our company. Our plan is to deploy this software to all other existing infrastructure as well. Within six months we should be fully implemented and deployed.

I rate the solution at eight out of ten because of the brand reliability in the market. They are the most trusted brand in the IT industry.

The primary use was for a private cloud for the company. I used it for an ERP system and several other applications that were specialized for the company.

It improved the workflow, as it's much faster than rack servers. It saved months of work. When we implemented the system, it took two or three hours and it took us about another eight hours to move from the old system to the new system. In any other case, it would have taken a lot more time.

• The most valuable feature was the backup - it was easy to back up. 
• The system was never down.
• It was very easy to administrate and manage the system; much easier and faster.
• It was easy to install, it was up and running in minutes.
• It was easy to extend the disk capacities.

Regarding the backup, it's much easier because it's using VMware. You can do large backups without using any additional software because it backs up VMware, the whole process, at the same time.

I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place. If there is a data disaster, you need somewhere where the data is stored so the company can still work, especially if you have several other facilities working on the system remotely.

It's very stable. We had no issues with downtime.

With a hyperconverged system it's easy to increase whatever you need. We needed to increase our data storage several times and we increased it very easily. The scalability was very nice and we didn't need any downtime to increase the system.

We had 40 TB capacity and 20 TB availability with about 70 TB of backup. There were about 200 users. Their roles included finance, HR; almost all the departments in the organization.

Technical support was very good. When we needed anything, they were always online. They were generally responsive and helpful. We had to escalate an issue with them once and it was solved in 24 hours.

We used a special ERP system for real estate development, using SQL servers. We used Oracle servers. We used MySQL for HR servers. Those were the main three systems we were using.

We switched to Cisco because it was time to change our servers. They would have been seven years old, so we studied what the best solution to convert to would be and we found that the hyperconverged was much better for us.

The initial setup was very straightforward. There were three people involved: me and two others. One of them was responsible for backing up the old system and one was responsible for the implementation. I was mainly responsible for the overall work, managing it.

After implementation it required one person for maintenance.

We did not use consultant when deploying it.

The areas where we saw ROI were in the administration time for the servers, the lack of downtime, and increasing the capacity. On a five-year basis, the ROI was about 20 percent.

It's much more expensive than rack servers. It was an issue, but when you compare it to the number of people who were administrative assistants before, it's on the positive ROI side. It's much cheaper.

We did a comparison between Nutanix, Dell EMC, and Cisco. In the end, we decided on Cisco over Nutanix. HyperFlex was more affordable, although I think Nutanix is a little better.

My advice is go for it. I had never had experience with hyperconverged, and it was a very nice experience. I learned a lot from it. It was something completely new.

I prefer any hyperconverged system. I think it's a great system.

We use the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series primarily for VDI environments.

As I am the integrator for the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series I've seen how it has improved my clients' ramp-up time to actually get the environment going.

The ease of use and the graphical user interface (GUI) are two of the most valuable features of this solution.

One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue.

Stability is 50/50 at the moment, based on the implementation experience.

I am very impressed with the scalability of this solution. It's easy to scale. 

I will rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

An initial setup is smooth when it's straightforward. When it has bugs, it's complex. With Cisco, we've experienced bugs with the software when we had to do updates and they were not fully documented.

I am the integrator. 

Our clients have definitely seen a return on investment using Cisco. They've even expanded the nodes almost within the first three months.

The biggest competitor is Nutanix and we considered using that first but when Cisco upped their game, their process became a little bit more streamlined. The hardware clients are more familiar with that.

Because of the bug problem I experienced with this solution, I will rate it eight out of ten.

We use it as an application server and for storage.

The feature that we are most interested in is the scalability. When needed, we are able to add more nodes and scale it up further. That is the feature which we sought. All three nodes are similar and maintaining paths is easy.

Our company has various business divisions. One of the business divisions has shifted to a new location. Other divisions will join in the future. We have started a data center for the first division that shifted, and as and when more divisions join, we'll be adding more nodes. That is the reason we see scalability as an important feature.

I would like it to be easier to manage the server, create VMs, and manage the VMs on the client.

As far as the server is performing, everything is good. There have been no problems and no downtime. We haven't been using it a long time but up until now it has been stable.

Our technical support is done through our partner.

We were using more on the VMware side. This is the first time we are using HyperFlex. We had an HPE-based system which we replaced with this. It was HPE Simplivity but it was no good. We did not get good feedback about Simplivity.

The deployment was very fast, they completed it in a couple of days. Cisco ships all the servers pre-installed. It was pretty straightforward. We didn't really have an implementation strategy. It wasn't so complicated.

The deployment only required one person from our side - our server maintenance engineer - and one from the implementation partner.

The initial setup was done by our implementation partner, S.K. International. Initially they struggled a bit and then, finally, they did a good job.

They are maintaining it right now. We may take over after a year. We will have a person to do all the maintenance. We already have a team maintaining the other servers, so maybe we will have them do this too.

Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount.

We have also gone for another setup from Cisco, which we should soon receive, the vGPU. On this second purchase they were not able to give the same discount.

We had various options. We looked at Dell EMC, Nutanix, and others. We also evaluated Simplivity, from HPE, and we finally ended up with HyperFlex.

With Cisco, the entire solution was from the same vendor, whereas with Dell EMC and Simplivity there were different vendors. Our main point was scalability. That's where Cisco scored well, but most important was a good price.

There are around 250 users working on it right now. It is used for our manufacturing solution which collects information and Exchange data. There are other users who are using the storage.

We will expand its use in the future. As far as the compute is concerned, we will be using it to pick up 60 percent of the work. As far as the storage goes, we are only using ten to 15 percent. In the next few years we will expand and in the seventh year we may have to upgrade or replace the server.

We have been using Cisco machines when it comes to the HX-Series product line (or category) in our organization. We are quite satisfied with the product because we primarily deal with Cisco when it comes to the compute and network parts.

The plus point of this particular product is its usability. The management of this particular machine is very good when I compare it with other competitors, like a model from HPE or Lenovo.

It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors. 

Cisco should improve on having more technical documents available on their website, as well as keep them update-to-date. I would especially like to see more compute documentation.

I would rate the stability as high. The machines are stable and the downtime is minimal

The scalability is good. I can scale it on the fly. I don't really have to invest a lot of time in scaling up these machines.

Whenever I log a TAC case, I receive a good response from the teams, so the technical support is good. 

Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag. This something which Cisco could improve upon. Otherwise, the technical support is really good.

It was more of an upgrade. We recently migrated the data centers in my organization and decided to have the latest models and technologies available in the market.

The setup was somewhere in-between straightforward and complex. The reason being our data centers do not carry a single type of hardware. We have an array of vendors implemented in our data centers. We have to mix and match, ensure the interoperability is tested before implementation. This takes some time.

I think we did hire consultants from Cisco.

When we did benchmarking on this particular product line, the results were great and quite amazing. This is why zeroed in on this particular product for many of our use cases. For example, we use these machines for SAP systems. We also use this for many of our cloud ready applications. The product is performing quite well.

We do have a large Cisco footprint in our organization.

It is a good product to have in your data centers. Pick a good use case, then do a PoC and perform your own benchmarking. Once you are satisfied, go ahead with the product.

The latest models include all the newest cutting edge technology.

We are consultants, and we set up this product for our customers.

I like Cisco Intersight.

The price could be better. I think it's more expensive than VxRail. In the next release, I would like to see a better level of protection and availability with six clients.

I have been working with Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series for about two months.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a stable solution.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a scalable solution. We have five or six people working on this solution.

Technical support is good.

I used to work with traditional solutions such as the UCS-C220 product.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is expensive. It's a standard license, and we pay for it yearly. I think we pay about 700.

VxRail is cheaper, more flexible than HyperFlex, and easy to back up. Most customers see that VxRail is more affordable, so why should I go with HyperFlex?

I will tell potential users that I think it's a good product. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight.