Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

We normally use a UCS, a uniform communication service, I'm still learning how HyperFlex works. We are evaluating it for use in the intermediate to deep future.

I do troubleshooting and monitoring on Cisco HyperFlex HX for our customers. I do maintenance and monitoring for the infrastructure environment.

We do a lot of internal projects like optimization, we also use ACI for optimizing the network. It simplifies the cost reduction.

The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization. 

HyperFlex is flexible for various projects. We have a lot of vendors doing projects where HyperFlex has been good at solving issues.

The scalability could use improvement. 

HyperFlex performs very well.

The scalability is up around 75%.

My team works on ACI and HyperFlex. They've had great Cisco support for that.

Our marketing team told us about the solution. They introduced every new technology that came in and gave us a demo. My managers considered the options and approved Cisco. 

The initial setup for HyperFlex is straightforward. It doesn't take much time. 

HyperFlex lowered our deployment times around one to two days based upon the environment of workers that we needed to invest.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product an eight. 

I completely recommend whatever Cisco solutions you use. They provide the best option to maintain infrastructure environment. It's very useful. 

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.

We use this solution for our Call Monitor and for Contact Center Express.

This is a robust product that we can rely on.

The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features.

We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution.

Managing this solution is complex and should be improved.

So far, the stability has been good. Since we implemented six months ago, we haven't had any issues. We were able to upgrade the code without interrupting the service, which is good.

We add more HyperFlex servers as we need, so it is pretty scalable.

Technical support for this solution is very good. This is a new technology for us, and we had to call a lot to ask for help with updating or integrating.

We were using UCS previously, but we needed better hardware for our Call Monitor.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house by following all of the instructions.

We have not yet seen the ROI.

Our licensing costs are large, but it is combined between all of the Cisco products that we have.

We trust Cisco and did not want to change vendors.

My advice for anybody who is researching this technology is to learn it before you implement it. This is a very stable product, but it is complex to manage.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this solution for our VDI. This is used to deliver our EMR and other medical and clinical applications to our residents and providers throughout the medical center.

One of the big benefits of using this solution is security. It allows us to authorize our residents to come in using their own personal devices to access any of our clinical applications and ensure that the PHI is secure and protected.

PHI is a major concern for us. Patient safety, patient security, and our data protection are the number one priorities for a lot of our solutions.

The most valuable feature for us was the time to delivery. We had a short window of about three months to implement because we had in incoming residence group of about a thousand users that they wanted us to have VDI up and running for. We were told about it in March by our CIO, and by June 1st it was up and running.

One of the challenges we have with Cisco, in general, is the multiple management platforms for the UCS, and I would like to see it all under one umbrella. If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great. There are three apps that we currently have to integrate with.

I would like to see them broaden their processor options. We've had some challenges with Intel, and I'd like to see them look at other potential CPU providers.

Stability has been excellent for us. We've been up and running on it for about eighteen months now, and we're in the process of expanding. We have a goal to have about six thousand users up and running by the end of this year.

The scalability of this solution has been excellent. We've been able to add additional HyperFlex units on the fly, and it's been pretty seamless.

So far, technical support has been very good. We've had a couple of challenges with some of the firmware updates we've had to do, and SMARTnet has been excellent at helping us to get through those.

Prior to this, we were using Cisco B200 Blade Servers for our normal VMR infrastructure, and we when we wanted to implement VDI we wanted to go hyper-convergence. 

The simplicity of the initial setup is one of the reasons why we picked this product. It is almost plug-and-play. It allowed us to install our first cluster of ten HyperFlex units, in each of our data centers, and within a couple of days, it was up and running. It was pretty straightforward.

We worked with Cisco and our reseller for evaluating the product, but when it came to the implementation, my team was able to do it on their own.

I do not have a good handle on the ROI, except to give an example from our implementation. Had we been required to buy laptops for all of the incoming residents, at say $2,000 per student, then we're talking $200,000. This is something that we didn't have to spend because we could deliver a VDI solution that lets them use their own personal device.

One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month.

We looked at everybody including Dell, HP, Cisco, and Nutanix. As we ferried through them we were much more comfortable with the Cisco product line, and that's why we ended up choosing it. Their technical support is very good, they had a great implementation for their HyperFlex, and we already had knowledge and experience working with the Cisco Server Blades. Cisco also had a competitive price point.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to have an understanding of the ROI. It is easy to jump in and see great technology, but you need to know what the long term cost is. One thing that we learned when we went into hyper-converged technology is the licensing costs that come with it. This is a yearly thing that you have to account for.

Overall, this solution was very easy for us to implement. Some of the challenges we're having are related to the management platform and the fact that we have to deal with multiple platforms at the moment. Once this is all consolidated, I would be happy to give a rating of ten.

Today, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

My job is to change the technical language to business language. We need to increase efficiency and effectiveness, decrease the cost and decrease administrative issues. We are increasing the population inside the company, increasing the staff.

People in the management of the company are trying to decrease the cost expenses and increase efficiency.

In this case, centralization brings a lot of advantages. We have one person who works on everything and gathers everything together.

It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing.

When you get a new product, the updates are very important.

The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues. 

It is absolutely stable. 

Scalability is one of the most important things with the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. In terms of scalability, this product provides maximum scalability.

We can easily increase horizontally. We can easily increase the number of nodes. It depends on the subscription.

We've worked directly with Cisco for the setup. We have our company team. We're also worked with a service provider. 

It's a team that consists of the Cisco people, the service provider, and our company's internal engineers.

Our ROI was about 100% over the last twelve months.

We always use Cisco for 95% to 98% of our capacity.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rank the Cisco HyperFlex HX at about 8.5 to 9.

Our primary use for this solution is remote office environments.

The product has helped our organization work seamlessly with staff in remote offices by providing storage and compute resources. These two things have made a big difference in how we are able to work effectively as an organization with diverse environments.

The best part about this solution is feature simplicity from the user end, besides providing storage and compute resources.

I don't really think it needs to be improved as far as the product itself. I can't think of anything yet that it doesn't already do. It fills our needs. It would be best if it continued to meet the needs of technology as it advances over time.

I think the documentation is a big con for Hyperflex. More substantial, straightforward documentation would help end users make more of their investment. There really isn't a problem with product functionality.

So far we have had no issues with the stability of the product. It seems very stable and has performed as expected.

We have not needed to scale yet, but I would say — based on what we know that product can do and our experience with it — that the solution is very scalable.

Technical support has been good. I've opened a few cases and I got great responses in a reasonable amount of time. 

We had a new situation and a new problem that came up in our environment so we started evaluating other potential solutions. The solution we had couldn't resolve the new issue. We researched and learned that HyperFlex could solve it.

The initial setup was very straightforward. No problems at all.

We self-deployed the solution without the need for external assistance.

Before we made our final decision, we evaluated VMware as a potential solution but felt that the HyperFlex better fit our needs.

I would rate the Hyperflex solution as a nine out of ten. This is not because HyperFlex is not meeting our needs but because nothing is perfect.

Our primary use case for the Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the hosting of VMs.

We were just using standard ESX clusters on UCS flights. Instead, they chose HyperFlex to see if it could replace that solution. 

This is just your standard ESX on blade server type of deployment.

Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions on the storage side by having one big storage space for hosting VMs. We do not have to provision other ones. That's a positive aspect of it.

I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept.

I don't work day-to-day enough with Cisco HyperFlex to be able to say what would necessarily make it better. Initial integration was tough. 

Our group was just looking for another approach to hosting their various VMs. 

So far, it's been fairly stable.

It seems like the Cisco HyperFlex is very scalable. Our deployment is small. We haven't tested out that aspect of it.

Technical support is good. I don't do day-to-day operations of it, another group does.

The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX was complex, i.e. trying to integrate it into an existing environment. It was more tailored for a brand new deployment, where you're just building it from the ground up. 

We already had an existing system and we're trying to integrate it into it.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate this product a seven. It seems like it would be easy to utilize for a new deployment.

I would prefer that Cisco not try to sell it as something that can integrate into an existing environment. They are beating down on that, but be aware. 

The limitations, whether you're doing a new deployment or trying to integrate it into an existing system, might be tough.

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 Cisco HyperFlex for two reasons:

1. At one data center, it's used as our primary virtualization and storage platform. 
2. At our other data center, it's used for VDI.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series has improved our organization. 

On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it's self-contained. At the data center, everything is in the virtualized section. It was easier to put that in there than build it, i.e. buy a stand, buy the computers, and get it all integrated with networking. 

With hyper-scale, we're able to go in very quickly and be able to get it up online.

Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly.

The initial implementation workflow could be improved. There's a lot of information you need to gather. At the time we deployed it, approximately a year and a half ago, that there was a lot of information that we needed to gather. It wasn't explicitly called out to in the workflow as you were going through the screens. 

We had to know what we were doing. We read a lot of documentation to get all of that information.

Stability is great. I found that with Cisco hardware in general, i.e. anything on the UCS or HyperFlex side.

The scalability is very good. Thus far, I haven't had to scale it out. In talking with my engineer, I'm very comfortable that when the time comes, we will be able to.

The technical support has been exceptional. We had some minor issues implementing it the first time. They were able to come in and help us out. We were up and running very quickly.

With any new technology, you hope that it is straightforward, but you expect some complexity. That is also true for HyperFlex when it was first implemented. 

We were in between revisions and had some minor challenges. We overcame them very quickly.

When we were deploying it, it was between two revisions. It was between HyperFlex 2.5 and 3.0. There were some steps in the 3.0 version that weren't spelled out. 

The engineers came in and helped us with that and we were able to overcome those challenges.

We did not use a vendor team. We took some courses through Cisco. We had our engineers come out and assist us.

We haven't seen a specific ROI. We've seen some across the board in separate environments for the data center and the VDI environment. 

We haven't seen a return on the investment but the performance is something that we are very happy with overall.

It's roughly $30,000 per HyperFkex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year.

We looked at a couple of different types of solutions. Nutanix was the leading competitor with HyperFlex. We went with Cisco because of their years of experience with HyperFlex and the support we had previously.

It was very straightforward using the technology platform. We were comfortable with it. In the VDI environment, we're a Cisco shop and HyperFlex did fit the need well.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate this product with an eight. Like any new product, it's constantly evolving. The evolution of the HyperFlex solution is a challenge.

I would recommend looking at the options when you go to implement it. Cisco's HyperFlex has a lot of different flavors. Make sure you pick the flavor for your specific implementation. 

VDI has a different set of requirements than a standard hypervisor environment. Know what your end state is going to be, then pick the equipment behind the scenes that fit your needs.