Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

The hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the most valuable aspects of the solution. Within the additional platform and then having the HyperFlex, the new solution of Cisco, it's actually quite advanced already. They are fast with the idea of not using storage and using HCI or hyperconverged infrastructure. Technically, I've been checking everybody's products and they are all very similar. The advantage of Cisco is it can install different platforms of virtualization software. It can install Hyper-V or it can also install VMware, for example - things we are using already and then it can work the IOPS that we provide. That's another thing.

The stability has been great. It's a quality product.

The solution scales extremely well. 

Technical support is fast.

They need to provide lower prices. It is pricey in comparison with other vendors - including Nutanix, or VxRail of EMC. They are quite expensive due to the fabric interconnect, the FI, that they have. The other vendors don't have those fabric interconnects while Cisco requires the fabric interconnect. 

The initial setup can be complex. 

We'd like to see a backup solution included in the product in the future. 

I've been using the solution for two years already.

I have a really high opinion of Cisco since I've been selling Cisco for quite some time and I have deployed it a lot. So far, the stability and the quality are really, really good. I have no issues with the stability and quality of Cisco. 

It's actually one of the HCIs that I consider to have a greater potential for expansion. The scalability of Cisco is better than the others.

Technical support is great They are very fast and responsive. 

In comparison with other solutions, it's quite complex to set up due to the fabric interconnects with it. That said, I'm used to it. However, if you're going to compare it with other setups, and other vendors don't have those things. I understand that Cisco's servers need those for server profiles, and the others don't have those advantages. Still, if we do a direct comparison with other vendors, that would be the disadvantage as it's an additional cost in comparison with the pure network that you would connect with the hyperconverged infrastructure such as Nutanix, PowerFlex, VxRail, or SimpliVity of HP. That's the disadvantage of Cisco.

Only one person is required to handle any maintenance responsibilities.

The solution is quite expensive when compared to other options, although their technology is better. 

You do need to pay a yearly licensing fee. How much depends upon how many are using it. I'm not sure how much in dollars, however, in pesos, it's around, if I'm 3 million to 5 million. Everything is included under on licensing fee. there are no extra costs. 

We use a variety of different versions of the solution. It depends. 

I'd advise new users to study the product. It needs, really, a knowledge of the product. I really highly recommend Cisco due to its stability and scalability, and also the performance of the equipment. It's got great quality. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Typically we use this Cisco HyperFlex cluster as our local server virtualization platform. We have all our services running in this cluster. In other words, we could say this is our local data center for all our business systems as well the core components of our IT infrastructure.

At this moment, we haven't upgraded to the latest version although Cisco has been encouraging us to upgrade, since they recently published a new version. We will schedule this change maybe next month.

I think its most valuable feature is its flexibility.

There are a lot of features that could be improved. We sorted out one critical issue left by the initial deployment team, our external partners. They made a mistake, a wrong configuration regarding the network settings. That left us a very, very painful troubleshooting process. Eventually, after four years, we sorted it out. After fixing that the system was stable. We even thought that maybe this is the root cause of those hardware failures.

In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud.

The first time that I started using the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series platform was in 2016 and I'm still using it today.

Before I got the second group of this system, I would have said it was quite stable. However, with the second cluster that I received, I experienced lots of hardware issues, and almost all with the RAM stick. The memory stick had been replaced by Cisco due to some hardware failure. It was really painful, and we couldn't sort out the reason. Also we experienced some hard drive failures for which Cisco provided a replacement. So I would say it's not quite stable.

It has very high rate of hardware failure.

We have nine people using it in my department, IT. We are the key users. They rely on us for running the system. So far, it is the only system I have to run. And in recent years, it is running more stably.

Their customer service is very efficient. Usually if we experience some technical issue, we open a case and Cisco Global Support will be on within one hour. So that's very efficient.

We have our external partners to help us with the installation and configuration, and generally speaking, it's quite straightforward.

At the beginning of our project, I remember that it took about one week to set up.

There were three people involved in the system configuration and set up. One guy was in my team and another two from the external partners. They were responsible for the hands on configuration and my guy was responsible for the acceptance test and the communication between the university and the supplier.

In terms of their license, they don't actually call it a license, it's called technical support. We have to renew that after certain periods. And it's not cheap.

I would recommend Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series only in a certain situation.

Right now, considering many other external constraints, it is very hard to recommend it to people, especially if they are based in mainland China.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series a seven.

We use it on our customer-facing network management and customer portals. It is run between two resilient data centers and runs very well.

We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers.

• High availability
• Replication

The stability has been really good. We haven't had any issues since it's been in production for the last six to nine months.

Scalability was one of the big selling points. Because we are using HyperFlex, we can add additional compute or storage resources without breaking the model that we have built.

I don't think we have had any issues, but the technical support that we have had has been good

We were using HPE SimpliVity. We knew we needed a high availability, resilient data center architecture. SimpliVity simply did not meet these requirements. This forced us to look around. Cisco had improved massively around HyperFlex. As a Cisco partner, it was a natural choice for us. 

It was fairly straightforward to bring online. We had a bit of complexity to think about how to migrate our legacy infrastructure into Cisco HyperFlex, but this was more of a risk management process for us as a business, as opposed to anything relating to the technology.

We are a Cisco partner. We used ourselves and our professional services for our deployment. I have to say, "They worked great."

We would not have invested if we didn't feel the return was there for our customers.

We were mostly looking between Cisco and HPE.

We are a Cisco partner, so Cisco is a more natural choice for us. Feature-wise, Cisco was a superior product, so it was a simple choice.

Work with Cisco and the Cisco partner. It is all about understanding your requirements. The product works well and supports your business. We recommend it.

We are a solution provider and Cisco HyperFlex is one of the products that we propose to our customers. This product is used for hyper-convergence in IT transformation and can be used for very heavy workloads such as VDIs or HAP HANA.

The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the fabric interconnect.

The physical switches are more reliable than the virtual machines.

using a virtual machine to manage the cluster, needs lots of pre-configuration & validation steps, as well may lead to cluster fail in case of the fail / corruption of the VM (unless you manage to have a valid backup to restore, with a valid cluster restoration plan), 

despite the managing of the Cisco Hyperflex, it comes almost preloaded & stand ready for deploying, as well in redundant architecture, which reflect a solid base for managing & reliability deployment. 

They need to make many improvements to this solution but the most important area is the compression. Most customers are concerned with the compression for a specific workload, and then maintaining it. The performance and compression vary depending on the type of workload; for example with SAS HANA, Cisco forces compression and that affects performance very badly. At the least, the customer should have the option to choose what types of workload should be affected by the data reduction functionality.

The second point is that they need to work on the erasure code. Cisco doesn't support erasure code, even over flash. If they fix this then they will only waste 25%. With replication and mirroring, it uses 100% of the allocated capacity. This means that Cisco needs to work on the architecture. I have conducted many PoCs and it is a problem that they need to work on.

Cisco offers a single cache drive cluster, whereas VxRail offers up to four cache disks per drive. When the cache disk fails in Cisco, the whole node fails, and the workload goes down. But when it comes to VxRail, if a cache disk files then only the node fails and the workload remains up and running. This is an area that Cisco needs to work on. Essentially, they have to raise the number of cache disks that can be included in a single node.

We have been working with Cisco HyperFlex for the past four years.

This is a reliable solution

This product is quite scalable.

Our usage of this product may increase but it is up to the customer. For example, when a customer is loyal to Cisco, they will implement HyperFlex. On the other hand, if it's a customer with a hyper-converged infrastructure then they will definitely implement VxRail.

Technical support from Cisco is responsive and depending on the problem, a hardware replacement is offered 24/7, which is good.

I have experience with similar products from other vendors.

HyperFlex is a very good solution, although not compared to Dell EMC VxRail. Both of them have many good features, although VxRail is better and yet, Cisco is more expensive.

If you consider my customers to be a community, 70% of them have VxRail and 30% of them have HyperFlex.

The initial setup is straightforward. The length of deployment depends on the number of channels but for between four and five nodes, it takes approximately two weeks.

This is an expensive solution, although Cisco will offer it free of charge when there is a large networking opportunity that arises. The licensing is perpetual and the only thing that you may need to pay for on a monthly basis is if you're going to use their cloud-based management features. This requires a subscription.

Cisco offers the on-cloud management system for HyperFlex but most of our customers that are using a hyper-converged infrastructure prefer to build their own, private cloud. In most cases, they have this solution installed on-premises.

Cisco HyperFlex is a product that I can recommend, although VxRail is my first choice. Depending on the customer, their environment, and history with Cisco, I will recommend one of these products over the other.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is very scalable. It is also very secure. Cisco's security portfolio is integrated with it, which makes it secure.

It is a platform-based device. Its performance is also fairly good in comparison to any other solution.

If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product.

Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors.

I have been using this solution for the last two years. 

It is stable.

It is scalable.

I don't set it up, but based on the information that I have from my customers, it is not difficult to set it up. It is easy to set up, but it is not easier than a SaaS-based product. Our customers buy only its latest version.

Its price is high. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Nutanix or VMware are cheaper products, and they provide almost the same functionality. Its price is a big road blocker when we are working with an end customer, and Nutanix and VMware are in competition. If they can reduce its price, it is actually a better choice for customers.

The OEMs from Nutanix, VMware, and Cisco have more or less the same features and functionality. The only thing that is missing in this solution is that it doesn't have a SaaS-based version. I would definitely recommend this solution for customers who are looking for an appliance-based product. Cisco HyperFlex is the best appliance-based product. It is better than Nutanix, even though Nutanix is more cost-effective than Cisco.

I would rate Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for the product is for the data center. We are hosting all of the servers and building infrastructure.

Cisco HyperFlex is helping us to put everything in centrally so that we can manage in one place. 

That's the whole reason why we got the solution, so that we can have better integration with all of our product applications.

We are still exploring Cisco HyperFlex. We have just deployed it. It's all automation. We want to automate everything. That's the reason why we bought it. 

One problem is that whenever we want to do something on VMware, you are dependent on HyperFlex. With everything now, you have to look into HyperFlex. 

You cannot just apply the VSXi updates. You are dependent on Cisco HyperFlex for metric services, analytics, and everything else. I don't like that dependency.

Stability is good so far, but there is a lot of learning. A lot of things are dependent on VMs. There are controlled VMs and you have to always make sure to keep those VMs up and running.

There is a lot of learning involved with ACI. That's huge. The technology which goes around HyperFlex, you have to learn, i.e. ACI, HyperFlex, VMware, etc.

One thing I like about this product is it is more scalable and fast, i.e. the disks and everything. We can extend our data center to some other places.

Technical support is fairly good. I have been able to get through to the right person. It took me a while, but it was not something very urgent. I didn't think it was much trouble.

We used a reseller called DIG. It was good. I was not part of that.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the product an eight. It's a great data center tool. I look at the weight of the costs too.

None of the products is 100% correct. We just deployed the Cisco HyperFlex. We have to see how it goes. We are also in the cloud. You have to keep looking for that option as it saves a lot on hardware and power consumption

We are still migrating all our old infrastructure, which is on C7000. We are doing that right now. Once that is done, I'll be able to get some metrics. Every company is different.

We use this solution as Active-Active and to host some of our applications. Compared to Nutanix, it is not as good. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is not a matured HCI solution. If something goes wrong with Nutanix, we use Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, so we at least have half of our systems running. It is helpful as a backup solution.

A lot needs to be improved. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good. Features are missing, and it does not support VMware Seven.

We have been using this solution for about three years, and I believe we are using version 4.5. It is deployed on-premises.

It is not a stable solution.

We have about 10,000 users. Maintenance is okay, but the hardware failure is too much, and sometimes memory is lost.

The support is okay but unprofessional.

The initial setup was complicated, and we had to struggle a lot. The switches, such as WAN switches, LAN switches, Nexus, and all those areas, are perfect. But when it comes to HCI, it is not a good solution. So we completed deployment with Cisco support.

I rate this solution a four out of ten.

We deploy these for our customers, we're in the reseller space.

Use cases are typically around data center revolutions, consolidations in virtualization density, and being able to scale both up and out.

On the architectural side of it, there's the single pane of glass. In the hyper-converged, there is that validated design approach of having all of the components which should work together.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is better than most.

The pricing can always be better on everything. 

The interdependencies of each of these functions and the configuration side are something that needs to be carefully architected so that if something isn't working in my memory stick, it doesn't have a cascading waterfall effect through the rest of my operation. The interdependency could be improved so that everything will not be so interrelated.

The initial setup can be a bit complex. 

We've been a partner with Cisco for over 20 years, and, as it pertains to HyperFlex, we probably deployed the first HyperFlex in the Northeast region - and that was probably four years ago. We did it when it first came out.

In terms of stability, it's way more stable than when it first came out. The earlier evolutions of this were like building the plane as we were flying it.

Cisco tech support, as bad as it can be, is better than most.

There's additional complexity around the solution.

In a hyper-converged scenario, the financial outcome is that you need to further align your refresh cycles of your storage, of your compute stack, and of your networking. From the client-side, that can also lead to a little bit of solution lock-in, a slight vendor lock-in.

Before, if I wanted to see maybe if my storage is up, and I'm looking at the time to adopt all-flash SSD or putting NVME in my environment, and updating my either blade centers, or pizza box servers, et cetera, it would all fit together. Even though that there's modularity built into the hyper-converged, there's still a little bit of a tax where you have to overbuy on other resources to provision that you want.

You don't need a huge team to deploy the solution. A deployment team is lightweight. It's two different individuals or maybe three with project management included.

We're a gold partner, one of their leading partners in our area.

Historically, I'm not very much pro-hyper-converge as there's a lot to the market still. What happens is, if it's poorly architected, that if something's screwed up, everything is screwed up. That's the part of the issue with the hyper-converged. You've got it very tightly knit. However, there are still advantages to the separation of failure domains, whether that be your compute, your storage, your memory.

I would take a Cisco Flex approach over a Cisco hyper-converged approach, all day, every day. It's the most widely adopted platform in the world for converged architecture and has a knowledge base that is way larger and has way more experience running. Also, just because you have to update one piece of it doesn't mean you have to update all pieces of it. My honest opinion is to still see what else is in the market to validate your approach to go with an all Cisco solution in the hyper-converged space. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.