Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is storage that is integrated with the stack as a standalone mobile unit. There is less infrastructure required. 

We have better computing power, better uptime, and easier management of the infrastructure due to it being a single unit.

I would like to see more flexibility in the storage.

If you have experience with Cisco, or you have experience with the HyperFlex HX itself, then it's a lot easier. If you do deployment on your own, there's a pretty steep learning curve.

Cisco technical support is very skilled. From what I've had to access, there were quick responses and the necessary escalation.

We were approached by Cisco originally to try out the HyperFlex HX. They installed a very small deployment of it and we grew from that.

The age of our equipment dictated that we have to upgrade. It was becoming end-of-life. That's what precipitated the move originally.

The setup was neutral since I was just learning. It was a little complex, but once I understood the purpose of the profiles and the templates, it became a lot clearer and easier. I would suggest getting contract services involved to help with the initial setup of the product. The setup time to figure it out yourself, especially if you are brand new to it, is extensive.

We used a professional integrator.

I can't quantify, but it seems to have a very good return on investment. We kept the equipment for a long time and it's worked flawlessly for us.

Our licensing is hybrid. We have all of our applications for billing and outage management through this.

Something else that we used before was the IBM BladeCenter. It was fine, but it was not as flexible. We couldn't deploy it and expand as easily as the Cisco HyperFlex HX.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco HyperFlex HX with an eight out of ten at this point. Only because I'm not as versed to it as I could be.

The initial setup of profiles and templates could be improved. Maybe some end profiles that you can use based on your type of deployment would be good, i.e. instead of having to go through and configure every portion of the template.

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.

• Customer POC
• Client VMware environment testing.

Easy to deploy and easy management for compute resources in collaboration with VMWare.

They have multiple storages connected with their environment, but the HX storage deduplication and compression feature is the best for the environment.

Single console management (like Hyperflex and FIs management).

I mean to say that, we need to log in 2 console one for vcenter and another for Hyperflex manager, this should be on same console page either hyperfex manager settings and monitoring in vcenter or vcenter can be managed by hyperflex console too.

100 / 100

Best from other competitor. (i believe )

i have face some issue during configuration and have support from Ciso TAC and thay have provide the best support with in time period.

i have configured Dell VXrail and i feel its little bit difficult yo configure then Cisco hyperflex. but the main advantage of VXrail is we dont need existing vcenter, it has its own vcenter cluster by default.

its inital setup is straightforward and easy, just need to understand the Ciso FIs configuration, one who understand that its easy for him.

i am working as a System Engineer for a vendor (IBL-Unisys Pvt Ltd) so i can surely say that we have experts in our organisation. :-) 

initial it cost much but it will pay back with its scalability feature and performance.

in my opinion, i recommend Cisco hyperflex.  

Dell VXRail, its good too but i like Cisco hyperflex because of its dedup and compression feature.

Cisco-HX-Data-Platform-Installer should contain its own ESXi and VCenter installation during setup, so it can be fit in any organization where no virtual environment is available.

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.

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.

I'm a solution architect and I use it to help my clients to achieve better performance in VDI solutions, in clusters, in database consolidation. The solution addresses these kinds of scenarios.

We have a large e-commerce client in Brazil. The company name is Sinova. This company has a lot of e-commerce portals. Every Black Friday in Brazil, before the HyperFlex implementation, the site would go down. The portals didn't have the performance ability to achieve the goals. After the implementation of Cisco HyperFlex, we added a lot of performance to these portals. We no longer have problems when high demand occurs.

Every year, we add one or two nodes to Sinova's web services clusters. The client uses the servers to support web servers for e-commerce.

I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform. I love this kind of visual.

It is a great platform because it's easy to use. It's easy to put a business inside this box. It's so practical.

Cisco has to continue improve the management tools to provide a better command line interface with more functions. That would be better for administration.

The stability is very good. I have never seen problems with the clusters or any component of the solution. It's very stable.

In terms of scalability, it is the best among all the competitors in the data center-hyperconverged world. We can add nodes to improve the compute of a cluster. We can add nodes to increase storage. We can grow a cluster up to 32 nodes.

The biggest that I have been involved in implementing was five nodes.

The initial setup depends on the business context. All the implementations that I participate in are a little bit complex. It's hard to integrate the platform with the client's data center network. The clients don't have the correct view for best implementing this solution. We need to help them understand, to provide the prerequisites. This is a little bit complex.

A deployment takes between three days and a week. A week is a good amount of time to understand, to implement it, to document it, and to help the clients understand it.

Our implementation strategy first requires us to write a good summary of the client's requirements so they will be using HyperFlex correctly. We need to understand the requirements. With this site survey, we can design the environment.

For a standard size of clusters with three nodes, two analysts is more than enough to implement the solution. After it's deployed and configured, one good analyst is needed to maintain it.

This kind of solution adds a lot of value because it helps the IT department to align with the business' view. We can participate, we can add value to the business because we do implementations faster and we can add compute and storage, many kinds of variables to the environment, very quickly and easily.

Here in Brazil, our point of view about the cost to implement or buy this kind of solution is that it is very expensive. It's very hard for almost all companies to buy even the small version of this solution. For me, this is the most negative point of the Cisco solution: the price and the licensing costs.

I have knowledge of VxRail from Dell EMC. I have also read about solutions from Hitachi and Super Micro. I haven't used them though.

To me, the key difference for me between the Dell infrastructure and Cisco infrastructure is that Cisco is more integrated. The hardware and software work the way I want them to.

Collect all the information about the environment to determine the prerequisites, understand the business, and understand the value of infrastructure solutions. 

We are a small partner. We have four clients right now that use the Cisco HyperFlex solution.

I would rate HyperFlex at ten out of ten.

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.

This is not the only product we use, so we have other solutions to compare it with. We can compare different products and different vendors and tell our customers which products have which advantages and disadvantages so that they can leverage these products in their own environment. This product helps us to understand the customer's needs and what issues they can run into.

The most valuable feature is the integration between our product and HyperFlex. We show our customers the integration between the backup and the deduplication solution that we offer and this CISCO hyperconverged solution.

The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process. 

I would like to see integration with multi-site ACI deployments so that we can span clusters between multiple sites, with ACI running within each site. 

The platform itself is very stable and robust, but when it comes to upgrading the system, it's not stable. The process of upgrading should be seamless so that the customer's data is not affected in any way. Nothing should happen to the customer's data during the upgrading process but we've had situations where the upgrade process did not go smoothly. We've had to open a tech case to solve the issues and sometimes we even have to evacuate the entire virtual machine clusters into another system. 

Scalability was kept in mind when they designed this product. We can scale from really small deployments to very large deployments. The scalability is not an issue with HyperFlex, it scales better than Nutanix and other vendors. 

Their technical support is really good. They are very professional, I cannot complain about the support. The only issue is that they will often only be available during time zones that don't work within European working hours. 

The deployment was not hard. We deployed the full server installation with CISCO HyperFlex. The original version that we tried to deploy was something like 2.2. We ran into a few issues but we managed to solve them on our own, without CISCO tech. If everything goes smoothly the entire deployment can take only a few hours. 

I did the deployment myself. 

We see ROI every day. The return on investment is fantastic and is the primary reason why we deployed these clusters all around our site locations so that our SE engineers can show the customers.

We also use Nutanix and Pure Storage. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the issues with the upgrading process.

We use it in junction with unified communication solutions. It provides great flexibility for our customers to expand the solution. Also, the ease of management is why they use HyperFlex.

We have some large customer managing some large hospitals in Denmark and it's very easy to make changes and expand with solutions around the hospitals. The management of the system can be done in a centralized way which has been a benefit for us. 

Most of our users are Cisco customers, so it fits in within the suites we use. Primarily for me, as a solution architect, it's the technology and architecture that is the most valuable. I know from my technical colleagues that it's easy to use and for the customer, the uptime is the most valuable asset. It's running and has low failure which is why we use it.

We are moving further out with more cloud solutions, so we need HyperFlex to be more cloud-connected. They should develop more connection to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud because our customers use their services and are moving in that direction.

We've had some downtime, but it's 99.5% stable. They can trust it. Hospitals are 24/7 driven, so we need to have a high uptime which is why we use HyperFlex.

It's a very scalable product because they have about 150 commercial services, so the scalability is very high, and the uptime is great. 

We use technical support if we have any issues or trouble with it. Cisco is always awesome. It's very easy to work with a Cisco tech.

Our customers know its time to switch solutions because of the demands from their users to deliver faster and to be more prepared for meeting their customer's needs. They're using my company and myself as a solution provider and a trusted technical adviser, so we work very closely with our customers in the decision making.

Our customers definitely see ROI. Cisco is involved each time we do a business case, and the customers today are very cost sensitive so they're looking for return on investment. That's also why they use Cisco because they can either expand the products or they can trade the products back to Cisco and get credits and then buy new products.

We also considered IBM and Dell EMC. They go with Cisco because they're using Cisco in most of their environments so it's the easy choice. As long as Cisco provides the technology and the features that the customer needs, they don't have the need to look elsewhere.

I rated this solution an eight out of ten because there's still a little room for improvement. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to connect with Cisco, use the resources that Cisco has. Be open, discuss with Cisco, discuss the architecture the customer designed, the customer demands, include Cisco all around, both the account managers, their technical solutions, the SEs, and so on. Use Cisco.

Our primary use case is for the distributed computing system in several data centers. 

It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time.  

The flexibility and scalability are the most valuable features. 

They should have more blade options and more configuration flexibility. Also, the price is expensive. It should be cheaper but it is worth the price. 

It's very stable. 

The scalability is one of its main features.

Technical support is very good. 

We switched because we wanted more flexibility, more features and because the global PoC price is better. 

The initial setup was complex because our engineers had some problems with putting it into production but it was fine after they solved the issue.   

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The features that it has are balanced with customer's needs and the price. In order to make it a ten, they should lower the cost.

I would advise someone considering this solution to explore all of the feature options. The solution's value is in its features.