Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

The most valuable feature that the B-Series has is related to the structure and architecture of the solution because in these solutions, you are using fabric interconnect as an interconnect device. The beauty of fabric interconnect is that it can work as in-house mode.

Fabric interconnect is the main component in the UCS solution. Fabric interconnect can act as two modes. One is in-house mode, and the other one is switching mode. The recommended one is in-house mode. When it works in in-house mode, it means that it won't process any storage, like flagging things, zoning, etc. It won't process Spanning Tree Protocol either. It will just proxy everything to the higher switch.

For example, if you have storage network traffic, the fabric interconnect won't process your flagging. It will make a proxy, and send it to your NPIV storage switch. It acts literally as in-house, and that makes the solution and architecture very easy, convenient, and scalable.

The other important feature is the switch technology that Cisco uses on their chassis. It's not like those of other brands. The beauty of Cisco is that with traffic interconnect, your network and storage won't come down to the chassis level.

It will stop at the fabric interconnect, and the traffic between the fabric interconnect and the chassis acts very similar to the fixed technology that Cisco uses between 2K and 5K. This means that the same architecture and the same technology that we use between 2K and 5K is used between the fabric interconnect and the IO module that's used at the back of the chassis.

This means that when you are using the IOM input/output module, the IOM module on the back of the chassis will not be like a regular switchboard. It will be just IO. So, this means that it is scalable. You can add as many chassis as you want to this whole solution, and you can remove them. You can move one chassis to another chassis. You can move one server from chassis one to chassis eight or chassis seven. You can have a lot of clusters. You can have a lot of failovers over the whole package.

Recently, with the new chassis, UCS X-Series, that Cisco recently introduced to the market, it is much more scalable.

The license is expensive.

Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.

It's very stable.

Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers. It's one of the most scalable solutions in the whole world.

The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at ten.

We use Cisco UCS B-Series as a central computing environment.

The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment. We have a virtual network interface, which means that we can easily reconfigure the machines according to our needs.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than ten years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a scalable solution with a fairly advanced environment that can scale easily. It is not cheap, but it provides the ability to scale up in terms of computing, networking, and memory. Around 2,000 people are using the solution as our central computing. In terms of management, we're a small team of ten people working with the solution. The solution is being used daily in our organization.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team takes some time to resolve our problems. It took them some time to ship us a spare part when we had a problem. For a big organization like Cisco, technical support is not straightforward and could be better.

Neutral

We previously used HPE and Cisco. We switched to Cisco UCS B-Series because we learned to trust Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series was a very stable and good solution. When we bought it last time, we managed to use it for many years.

The solution’s initial setup wasn’t easy.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. The solution was deployed by two people in a few days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a four out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is part of our VMware environment. The Unified Architecture is one of the unique features of the solution that is very usable for us. With the feature, we can immediately understand that we need to configure a separate environment and easily configure networking to allow us to distribute the environment.

The solution is deployed on-premises, but it's managed by the cloud environment. The solution’s maintenance is done by one person. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company uses Cisco UCS B-Series for multiple use cases. Mainly, we use the product in our company for the general IT infrastructure deployment.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its massive computing power, so you can have big data or mission-critical applications running on SQL Server.

The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details. The price of the product's license could be improved.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for almost seven years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution, but it requires a lot of the skills to be able to manage and expand the product.

Around six to seven customers of my company work with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers.

The solution's technical support is good and knowledgeable.

The initial setup can be complex, even for someone skilled enough to deploy the product. The deployment is generally not easy since Cisco UCS B-Series directly interacts with Cisco Fabric Interconnect.

The solution can be deployed in five to six days.

The deployment process for Cisco UCS B-Series consists of an approach in which you just provision the servers and upgrade Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects. Whatever the hypervisor will be, you can take the product to the next level when starting with the product.

An experienced person can handle the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money.

There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product.

There is an additional cost consisting of the modules a person wants to use, apart from the standard licensing costs of the solution.

Cisco makes it possible for its users to work with the new series of its products, which is Cisco's M6 series blade servers, and Cisco also allows for a lot of enhancements to be made. It is a fine solution for big customers.

Considering the multiple use cases for which the solution can be used, others who plan to use it can consider purchasing and deploying it.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to help manage our data centers.

Stateless Blade is the best feature. If we have a blade go down we find that the server continues to work well.

The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

Cisco UCS B-Series is stable.

The solution is scalable by adding additional hardware.

The technical support is good but can sometimes be delayed.

Positive

We use HPE BladeSystem and Cisco UCS B-Series but we are going to replace them both with the Cisco X210c M6 series because of the high performance.

The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration is also simple.

The implementation is completed in-house.

The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Around ten administrators are required to manage the solution.

I recommend the solution to others because it has good performance and is highly stable with little downtime.

We've used blades and hyperflex. It's for data center refreshes and greenfield solutions. We've done a lot of HCI Solutions.

We're basically taking old three-tier storage, no compute, networking solutions and then pulled into an ACI solution hyperflex or blades. I've worked on both the UCSX series and also the B series. M6, M7, and M5, and with a lot of fabric interconnects - just pretty much anything and everything for UCF.

Over the years, it's been it's come a long way from going from UCS manager to intersite managed solution. So we're doing a lot of cloud type management where we've been able to use that as which are like tenant managed services solutions with Cisco UCS and Hyperflex. We have managed services. Engineers that do manage all the customer's inter-site portal configurations, and then also we manage all the deployments, and pretty much we build run books and everything for them so that they know how to customers know how to how to work with their the hard new hardware for the hyperflex environments. Overall infrastructure-wise, we manage that for them, and they just manage internally.

It's modular. You can get higher-density blades within the 5108 chassis and the 9508 chassis. With the X series, it's even better, as you can add bigger blades and more processing and memory. It is a lot more resource-intensive and scalable. 

The solution is stable.

The setup is straightforward. 

InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting.  

I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot.

The solution is expensive.

Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.

I've used the solution for probably over ten years. 

It's pretty stable. I'd rate the reliability eight out of ten. 

The B series is pretty scalable. You can have several chassis within an FI pair. Then you could have multiple UCS domains. Now, with the InterSite, you can have multiple configurations more so than the UCSB series with the InterSite managed solutions where you can have B series and you can have both UCS manager and InterSite yet you can't have both. With the UCS X series available, that's another game change.

Our customer base definitely intends to increase usage.

From a partner perspective, we pretty much can troubleshoot more in-depth than some of the tech engineers. We've had a lot of tech engineer engagements with our large customers, and wasn't that I wasn't that impressed. They just seemed not to have a full understanding of what the customer issues were, and that took a long time to sort out. 

They also had multiple tech engineers involved. That prolonged the overall support for the customer. We jumped in and had more expertise, and we were able to help solve the issue before the tech in a lot of cases.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. 

You can deploy on-premises. We've also worked with customers in remote installations where they would rack a stack, and then we would do a remote configuration on everything if it's through either a VPN or a Webex session, a Cisco secure Webex session. If it's InterSite, we can pretty much do it remotely. There's no UCS manager available to support that now, and everything's pretty much in the cloud managed, which is nice.

I typically note a three-year ROI.

The solution is pricey, and Cisco's prices change every month - or, at least, it seems that way. It's a constant challenge for our customers. However, we work with account executives at Cisco and work to get discounts. 

New users need to definitely understand how the UCF manager works. They need to understand InterSites, fabric interconnects, and how everything connects both up links to the northbound core switches and make sure all the connectivity is correct. 

Connectivity is a big issue. If you don't have the right connectivity configured specifically for the UCS manager with the FIs and also the fabric modules coming off the chassis, there will be a lot of issues. I've seen a lot of attack-related issues going forward. Users need to make sure that they have everything configured correctly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

This is an on-premises enterprise solution that is primarily used for Microsoft, Linux, and Oracle workloads which require intensive computing for hosting/running clustered and standalone applications.

The solution is very reliable in comparison to the other brands. Additionally, the uptime is very good, and they ensure 99.9% of uptime.

The configuration could be simplified as the initial setup process is complex.

We have been using this solution for eight years for multi-organizations.

The scalability is very portable and swappable. So we can add and expand resources easily. Dozens of people are using the solution in our organization, and six are responsible for managing the infrastructure as administrators.

We have had experience with the customer service and support team multiple times when there is a hardware failure, and we requested an RMA for the replacement.

The initial setup is difficult as it is a Unified Computing System, and expertise is required to configure it. Implementation normally takes more than two hours to initialize a new blade, or DC server and initialize a new chassis. However, this solution requires days because the cable installation, uplink planning, deployment, and everything is included. So we need to create a complete project plan for the technical side to deploy this equipment.

It is expensive, which is why limited customers utilize it. However, it is enterprise-class, reliable, stable, and fast. In the past eight years, I have never had any bad experiences with Cisco UCS or faced any outages.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is a tricky piece of equipment with state-of-the-art technology, reliable parts, good stability, and robust features. When you need to compute, it will provide you with speed. However, the solution can be improved by simplifying the configuration.

I use it for telephony. 

The telepresence devices are improved. You can call by phone handset only, video call, and integrate with Teams and other third-party tools.

First of all, Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing. They charge recurring fees every year for everything, even adding phones. Technically, it's good, but that is one fault.

Previously, it was perpetual. Buy it and use it. But now, it has changed. 

I have five years plus experience with it. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability as seven out of ten. Other vendors also have easy deployment methods, sometimes even easier than Cisco.

Our clients are enterprise businesses. 

Overall service and support from Cisco is very good. They give the perfect solution.

They are good, but the warranty claiming process is lengthy. We have to get on calls with different people. The channel partner also charges to claim it. The end-user should have all the privileges to claim the devices directly with Cisco.

Positive

We are not going to use Cisco for our upcoming large telephony project because of the high pricing and recurring charges.

The initial setup is easy. It takes a few hours. 

I am the implementor. 

It's expensive. Cisco is always expensive compared to other vendors.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the product for hosting our servers.

The platform provides robust compute power for hosting our servers.

The product pricing needs improvement. 

We have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for a year. 

Cisco's technical support is top-notch. They've been responsive and helpful whenever we've needed assistance.

Positive

We used Dell previously but have since used Cisco and HPE solutions exclusively.

The product cost is high compared to HPE solutions. However, maintenance and support services are included in the standard licenses for the first three years. 

Managing Cisco UCSB B-Series has been straightforward. While we've also used HPE in the past, both platforms offer similar manageability features. 

The documentation and support have been comprehensive. I rate it a nine out of ten.