Cisco Intersight Reviews

The first use case is to build a hybrid cloud. The first thing is to configure the server. The server could be located either on an edge location or on the data center, or it could be a remote office branch office. Cisco Intersight gives us a single pane of glass through which we can configure and monitor a server which is geographically spread, based on different locations.

Another use case involves certain workflows that we can run using Cisco Intersight. For example, it has cloud orchestration capabilities. We use it to run NetApp-related day-to-day operations. For example, we can do some volume-related, storage-related tasks directly from Cisco Intersight. It invokes a Terraform-based script through which you can just do your day-to-day operational tasks.

Another use case is that we also leverage Cisco Intersight for installing ESXi, as well as it has tight integration with Red Hat OpenShift. For the customers who are going into Kubernetes, for that we leverage Cisco Intersight, and we can directly boot those servers using the Red Hat operating system. Basically, it's a core operating system of Red Hat.

In Cisco Intersight, if you compare it from Cisco UCS Manager, it's local to a single UCS domain. But with Cisco Intersight, if you have a large data center, you can manage it and you have great visibility using Cisco Intersight. You can do a lot of automation using Cisco Intersight, and the consistent policy can be applied thoroughly to your resource group. It always gives you a cloud experience, especially when you talk about compute.

I particularly appreciate the policy feature. For example, I have two or three different stacks. For the first stack, I'm running a bare metal where I need to deploy Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And in the second stack, I need to deploy a VMware-based workload. And the third could be a Kubernetes distribution. With Cisco Intersight, you get flexibility through which you can create different policies, because everything is policy-based. And you can still have a consistent configuration and apply those policies based on your requirement. This is one of the best features because if you look into the VIC card of a Cisco server, which is a Virtual Interface Card, for each operating system, you need to have a specific configuration. There are certain templates which are already there. For example, if I need to select a VIC card of 15,000 series VIC card, there will be a predefined template for VMware, which I can select and use it for my server profile. That is one of the best benefits I can think of having Cisco Intersight.

The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed.

I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.

I have been using this for more than seven years.

In general, it's good when I compare it. From Cisco Intersight, you will not face any issue. But if you look into the hardware side, if you are not getting proper cooling, if the cooling in the data center is not that efficient, then you might see some temperature-related issue which can impact the performance, and you will get a lot of alerts. But the good thing is that Cisco Intersight will be able to capture everything in detail, and even you can configure the call home. So you will get notified if anything is going wrong. Even if one port is also down in one of your fabric interconnects, you can immediately get an email. That is a good thing.

It's very smooth. If you talk about scalability, you can create a server profile immediately, and you can map to multiple servers the moment you try to scale. Similarly, scaling down goes the same way. You can just disassociate those server profiles and remove it. Those servers are free for use again. It's quite good.

Cisco TAC in general is quite good. But sometimes, it totally depends upon the reason of that TAC case. For example, if I'm opening a case and that case is getting landed to one of the US engineers, or it's in South America or North America, I expect the quality of support will be very good. But sometimes because of the locality or the region specific, if the case gets landed into some other queue, some other region, I might feel that inefficiency from the support side. But overall, it's good. If it's very urgent, you can immediately ask the duty manager to escalate this issue. They will put a lot of attention into solving the things. Overall, I can say that the support side is good.

I am currently working with NetApp. I work on Cisco and NetApp products, both. I have used NetApp BlueXP, which is rebranded with the name NetApp Console.

For the beginner, definitely it's not that straightforward. You need to read the document properly. If there are any deployment guides, such as how to set up Cisco Intersight environment, you need to work through thoroughly. It's not straightforward if you compare it with how UCS Manager used to be. Definitely, it's a little bit complex because of multiple policies, and you need to know how you are calling the objects, because it's kind of object-oriented based. First you create a policy, then you need to call that policy in some different object. Those things are there. But once you get accustomed and practiced on Cisco Intersight, then it's easy for you. But for a starter, definitely it's a little bit complex.

It totally depends upon what you want from Cisco Intersight, because they have different categories of licenses. For example, you have Advantage license and Essential licenses. Definitely, if you want to do a lot of automation using Cisco Intersight, you need to go with the Advantage license, and that can be a little bit pricey.

I work as a partner. For optimizing, Cisco has various tools. If you talk from a network point of view, they have recently launched Nexus One. That gives enterprise an opportunity to configure a heterogeneous environment. For example, if you're having a campus networking and data center using different devices such as Catalyst, Nexus switches, you can still manage everything. And at the same time, if you still have software-defined network, which is the ACI product from Cisco, you can still manage that. With that, you will get a single pane of glass to configure and to automate the things. You don't need to log in to multiple setups to look into each device. And on top of that, they also have telemetry. That tells you how the traffic pattern is going, and based on that, you can apply configuration on your devices.

In our lab also, we have Cisco switches. You can develop a lot of automation because Cisco is rapidly working on DevNet. You have different options. You can use NSO also to configure the devices, or you can integrate with Terraform, or they also have infrastructure as code. You can leverage those playbooks if you're dealing with Ansible, and you can also do the automation on your day-to-day ops. Recently, Cisco also has some announcement with Quali. It's a stack automation. We are doing the testing with Quali. Basically, this will help for Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 deployment or Day 2 operations as well. It supports multiple stacks. And suppose, as per looking into engineering effort, suppose some team has already developed a lot of playbooks for different tasks. If suppose moving into a different tool, can say that so we are wasting a lot of engineering effort. But with the stack automation Quali, you can still use those playbooks and can do your Day 2 operation. I think that will definitely help an organization in their Day 2 operation and can help the efficiency in their operations.

With Splunk, it's very good. Splunk has a very great capability. You can do log analysis. You can have a deep visibility. And you can also have Cisco ThousandEyes. That helps you the entire network packet flow. It can even look into the application side of it and tell a network engineer that the problem is not on the network side, it's the application itself is having some issues. Visibility-wise, they have different tools, different offerings. You need to get the right tool for yourself. And Splunk is a great tool if you want to get a lot of logging, telemetry data. You can put everything into Splunk and you can get a dashboard that helps in improving your operational visibility, helps you to detect the threat as well. You can create different dashboards. And the best part is that if you're having a converged infrastructure in your data center, you can have a visibility of each stack. It's not only about having compute, network, storage. You can still look into GPU, NVIDIA side of it, or any Kubernetes that you're running, for example, Red Hat OpenShift. It's very good visibility if you're going with Splunk.

It definitely enhances the troubleshooting capabilities. And also, suppose you have built a SOC team, a Security Operations Center. If you have a proper Splunk dashboard setup, it will help the SOC team directly also because they can immediately look into if there are any abnormality happening, a sudden spike happening within the network or any application is getting compromised. The SOC team also can get heavily benefited if you have a proper Splunk setup in your environment.

Cisco Intersight definitely enhances the troubleshooting capabilities. Because as I mentioned, the first is you can directly work with TAC seamlessly. Cisco Technical Assistance Center is the TAC. In the old days, during the old time, we needed to work on an individual server, provide the logs from a single domain. It was a very cumbersome task, and it was lots of time-consuming. But with Cisco Intersight, now you can directly create the support bundle, and it can be fed directly to Cisco TAC. That helps you in getting engaged with the Cisco TAC or getting proper support from Cisco. Apart from that, doing the upgrades. Since now it's a SaaS and it's a centralized product, if you plan to upgrade your Cisco Intersight, if you plan to upgrade your UCS domain through Cisco Intersight, you can directly do it. You don't need to log in locally to each domain. That is one of the great enhancements that I can see.

I purchased Cisco ASA-V from Marketplace. My overall review rating for this product is 8.

My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system for the hypervisors.

A specific example of how I use Cisco Intersight for this process is when I'm claiming a server to Cisco Intersight, assigning the profile, and after installation of the configuration and everything, I assign it the OS install workflow, where I install an ESX server, and therefore the configuration of the ESXi host is already predefined.

For monitoring, if there's an outage or something not working, I can open a TAC case immediately, and if there's an issue, I can use KVM for troubleshooting as well.

In my experience, the best features Cisco Intersight offers are OS deployment, configuration profiles, and KVM, so I can log in from the cloud to the KVM and directly restart multiple servers at once without connecting to a CIMC on each server itself.

Out of those features, I find myself using KVM the most because it is highly efficient for my needs.

Cisco Intersight has positively impacted my organization by providing more automation and less manual work, as everything can be automatic after registration to Cisco Intersight and offering more visibility as well.

Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I have an advanced license, but the problem is most of the features I cannot use itself, such as creating new storage or installing updates and firmware updates directly from there as well.

I have been using Cisco Intersight for six months.

Cisco Intersight is stable.

Cisco Intersight's scalability is solid and acceptable.

Customer support for Cisco Intersight is amazing. If I have an issue, I open it with customer support or I contact my account manager. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we had no setup cost because we set it up ourselves, and the pricing is solid for what we get.

My company has a business relationship with this vendor as a partner.

I have seen a return on investment, as we need fewer employees, and most of it can be done from one dashboard.

Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we had no setup cost because we set it up ourselves, and the pricing is solid for what we get.

Before choosing Cisco Intersight, I did not evaluate other options. We evaluated the server platform itself, and because we went for Cisco servers, we decided to go for Cisco Intersight.

I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten.

I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and different management, and I think the usability and the features are rounded up. There is a lot more automation than just manual work, where you have it on most of the vendor systems.

Regarding Cisco Intersight's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are good, and this also assists me in certain ways.

The accuracy and reliability of the output from Cisco Intersight is actually pretty good, and most of it handles itself.

I face no specific challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks that Cisco addresses.

I assess the operational efficiency of Cisco in my IT environment as perfect, as I need it.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco Intersight is that it's a solid ten out of ten, as it's perfect.

End-to-end visibility from Cisco affects my organization's troubleshooting capabilities a lot, as it mostly finds things already on the dashboard if there's an issue.

My advice for others looking into using Cisco Intersight is if you're going for Cisco servers, Cisco Intersight should definitely be a solution you implement if you want to have visibility and more automation to do mass deployment. My overall rating for Cisco Intersight is nine out of ten.

I deployed Cisco Intersight for my customers, but I do not use it in my company now. We don't use Cisco Intersight for our company, as we've deployed it to other institutions. While I am still supporting them, we deployed Cisco Intersight a few years back.

The most valuable features I find in Cisco Intersight include the fact that it's a cloud-managed solution, which automates the process when a part on the server goes faulty. For example, if you have a module that goes faulty, automatically a TAC case opens at the Cisco level, and everything is automated, meaning there's no need to check for this.

The orchestration when creating a service profile for the servers lets you spin it off on other servers, so it's more of a management layer. It's not on-premise; it's on the cloud, making it easily available. I would say it simplifies the management and orchestration layer.

Cisco keeps innovating their products, so right now I think they are quite good for the time being.

Regarding additional features I would like to see in the future to make Cisco Intersight even better, I don't have this answer right now, as I will need to check and explore it more in depth. As I mentioned, customer use of Cisco Intersight is not something that's easily sellable here in the country, where I have only done two deployments over the past five years, with the next deployment likely happening early next year, so I have not had that much chance to work with it extensively.

I've been working with Cisco Intersight since the last deployment, which was back in 2020.

Assessing the stability and reliability of Cisco Intersight, I find the reliability is very good. There is only one thing I don't know yet: I need to inquire about what happens if my subscription gets expired. Will I be able to use that equipment, considering that it's a cloud subscription? After five years, if I don't have access to the Cisco Intersight portal, how do I manage my servers if I want to conduct some test environments?

Cisco Intersight scales straightforwardly with the growing needs of the organization. Each Cisco equipment purchased can be onboarded onto Cisco Intersight as long as you have the correct SKU license, so I don't think this is an issue.

I would rate the technical support by Cisco as an eight or nine, because Cisco TAC is one of the best TACs I work with.

Assessing the operational efficiency of Cisco, I find they are doing a good job for the time being, so I would rate them an eight out of ten.

My deployment of Cisco Intersight was straightforward, as we did not encounter any issues. Before Cisco Intersight, we used the traditional Cisco UCS on-premise. I deployed it before, and when we got Cisco Intersight, we used the same logic, managing to do the full deployment. We had professional services from Cisco included, but we did not use it, aside from QA, where the Cisco engineer connected and vetted all the configurations at that time.

My deployment of Cisco Intersight was straightforward, as we did not encounter any issues. Before Cisco Intersight, we used the traditional Cisco UCS on-premise. I deployed it before, and when we got Cisco Intersight, we used the same logic, managing to do the full deployment. We had professional services from Cisco included, but we did not use it, aside from QA, where the Cisco engineer connected and vetted all the configurations at that time.

My deployment of Cisco Intersight was straightforward, as we did not encounter any issues. Before Cisco Intersight, we used the traditional Cisco UCS on-premise. I deployed it before, and when we got Cisco Intersight, we used the same logic, managing to do the full deployment. We had professional services from Cisco included, but we did not use it, aside from QA, where the Cisco engineer connected and vetted all the configurations at that time.

Regarding pricing for Cisco Intersight, all the prices from different vendors have drastically increased during these four years, so I would say it's expensive. However, when you look at what you get, the product and the value-added features of the products mean if you can finance it, then for sure everyone would go with Cisco instead of the different options, especially when it concerns servers. On the firewall and switch side, they have other competitors, but for the UCS servers, UCS X, and the Fabric Interconnect, we would definitely recommend Cisco.

When considering whether Cisco Intersight is not well spread due to pricing or because they should improve their marketing strategy, I think it's primarily due to pricing first. We have many competitors such as Supermicro, Dell, and HP, which are very aggressive in the market right now, leading most companies to consider the price of solutions. When it comes to price, other competitors are somehow more competitive.

As for whether Cisco Intersight is a market leader and the best option on the market, I don't know about other vendors with similar software as a service. For now, I only know about Cisco Intersight.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco Intersight is that it's very good. On their websites, it is very intuitive.

Cisco keeps innovating their products, so right now I think they are quite good for the time being. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

Positive

Most of our customers use Cisco Intersight for virtual environments, primarily for VMware vSphere hypervisor and some Windows clusters. They see it as a major tool for data center management tasks and system policy management.

We have visibility into other products and storage, facilitating coexistence with Cisco and other vendors, thereby enabling us to see all the infrastructure clearly.

Cisco Intersight is a very effective tool for data center infrastructure management. It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure. We have visibility to other products and storages, some networking. It is also valuable for its integration capabilities with other products.

There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment. A seamless migration tool from UCS Manager to Intersight would be beneficial.

I have been using the solution since it was released, actually since the announcement of M7, which might be a couple of months prior.

As far as I know, the solution is quite stable. There have been no glitches or problems directly related to Intersight.

There have been no scalability limitations or issues that I can mention.

I am not personally involved in dealing with customer service or support. However, I understand my colleague received satisfactory answers from them.

Positive

I am not involved in the setup process as a presale consultant; it is managed by the post-sales engineers.

The implementation is performed by a group of engineers who are familiar with the systems.

Most of our customers purchase the system for three years or more. I'm not aware if any customers use an ROI tool to assess their returns.

I haven't heard any complaints. The pricing mechanism sounds fair.

As a technical consultant, I focus on the technical aspects and needs of the customers. I always try to stay within budget and sometimes advise customers to slightly increase their budgets for better solutions. 

In all, I rate Cisco Intersight a strong nine out of ten.

I use it mostly for managing servers and updating their hardware licenses to get the hardware status in the cloud. Mostly, my customers develop Intersight on-premises because there are many restrictions from regulatory bodies for cloud sessions or going to the cloud for any data. 

It is almost always implemented as on-premises. There are many servers to look after; previously, it was for HX. If customers are currently going for HCI, we will need Nutanix and Intersight.

We no longer need to use Fabric Interconnect. We can directly use Intersight to bring up the cluster of HCI. I have seen an ROI from this solution. This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.

I do not have notes for improvement. 

I have used the solution for not more than two years.

Most of my customers don't complain, so stability seems to be okay.

I don't need to go beyond the scale I have.

For Intersight, and in general, Cisco provides better support than anyone else. However, sometimes it depends on the engineer. 

Positive

I rate it a ten out of ten. I don't have any issues with it.

We implement it.

I have seen an ROI from this solution. It's not just in terms of cost savings. It is also in time savings and requiring fewer people to operate this tool. Sometimes it's about indirect costs as well. The solutions are good.

There is another grid in the market. Customers are looking for other solutions more often. They are going with solutions that provide all solutions together, like Nutanix, which can implement everything without needing two solutions from two different vendors. I think it is okay in this case.

If your environment needs the capabilities required on Intersight, such as HCI implementation, I would suggest it. 

The overall product rating is eight out of ten.

We are a cloud provider serving customers with IaaS.

The features enable you to abstract the server personality away from the hardware, similar to the B-Series.

Cisco Intersight does have some integrations, though we have other automations to accomplish similar tasks, so we do not require Cisco Intersight to do everything.

The firmware management in the S-Series is not as Cisco described when we purchased it. You should be able to manage firmware without bringing the host down, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, it brings both servers in an S-Series rack down.

I do not use HyperFlex. It would be beneficial if Cisco had provided a migration path from UCS Central to Cisco Intersight.

The maintenance pricing is overly expensive.

First-level support quality can be problematic at times.

I have been using this solution for 30 years.

I have not experienced any errors. I have not had many issues with the B-Series overall. The usual RAM issues occur, but that is typical with server maintenance.

The technical support is good, and I would rate them an eight.

Positive

We are still working with Cisco.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I have experience with B-Series, C-Series, and S-Series equipment. I would recommend the S-Series but not the C-Series. I would rate this solution an eight overall.

The most common use case was the HyperFlex deployment in the past. However, with HyperFlex being discontinued, I now focus my efforts on selling Intersight with iWORK Waterlog Optimizer. This is valuable for clients with hybrid environments.

The visibility and optimization of workloads are very important features for the company.

The optimizer is valuable for selling the solution. Intersight offers a simple monitor feature, which can be integrated with other Cisco products, while still providing a solution with another brand. Additionally, it offers visibility and optimization of workloads, which are very important features for a company.

More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware. There is also a need to increase the number of partners.

I have worked with Cisco Intersight for approximately three years.

It is a good platform that is available for clients. However, it has a few bugs or issues that require technical integration to resolve. Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.

I would rate the scalability of Cisco Intersight as eight out of ten.

Technical support from Cisco has been mixed. For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX. It can be difficult to escalate issues with a basic smart net.

Neutral

The initial setup is not complex, however, certain issues with devices need to be addressed by technical support.

I am not involved in pricing topics, however, regarding licensing, it is very simple to understand for both myself and the customer, making it easy to manage.

Even if there are some issues during the first implementation, Intersight offers many features that provide great value to companies. The solution is generally valuable, even if the customer uses non-Cisco products.

We use the solution for server management across various locations.

With Intersight, it is pretty simple to manage all the environments. We don't really need to deploy any management solution.

Intersight can validate our environment. It tells us if the environment has issues and whether they are critical. It's pretty easy to connect with other tools. Intersight’s analytic features played a big part in our decision-making processes. We wanted the analytics to see how the environment is working. It was one of the reasons why we chose to buy Intersight. It requires a license.

We used the solution's automation capabilities, but it wasn’t easy. It was part of why we took some time to deploy the solution. It didn't give us much value. It wasn't that good. Intersight is a pretty complex solution. It can give you a lot of things, but nothing is simple. The usability must be better.

I have been using the solution for the last few months.

We never had any issues with the stability.

It’s a cloud solution. We never do anything in terms of scaling the environment. It is scalable. There is nothing for us to configure, manage, or maintain. Two system administrators are using the product in our organization. It is used once a week. If we don't have any alerts and don't need to change anything in the environment, we barely use it.

The technical support is not that great.

Neutral

The setup is straightforward. It is very easy to deploy the tool. It is a cloud solution. Cisco manages everything. We consume it as part of the public cloud and connect our environment. It doesn’t require maintenance. The inter-site deployment can be done within a few minutes. It was very straightforward and easy.

The solution was deployed in-house.

The product is cost-effective. We do not pay much for the tool.

We have evaluated Scale Computing and some solutions from HPE. One of the benefits of Intersight is its ability to examine the environment. We can understand whether everything's working fine and everything is connected correctly. It gives us an insight into how our solution is deployed.

The one big advantage is that it helps us know whether our solution is deployed correctly, whether we have the right drivers and devices, and whether everything is working correctly. I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.