Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

• Remote Access to the device
• Ability to scale to different servers
• Centralized management

Customers and organizations are benefited by its scalability, flexibility, and the fact it takes less time to deploy.

I've used it for almost one year.

In most of our deployments, no issues were encountered.

The product is stable (with new versions of the firmware), although previous versions were having some issue with stability.

In most of our deployments, no issues were encountered.

Very satisfied with the level of technical support from TAC.

We were using HP Servers but switched due to it having better features and scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward, and a of lot technical documents are also available from Cisco to help.

We have implemented it through our own team in-house.

It's a win-win situation for both customers and vendors due to its features.

Before we had to look for other options, but now we just check the different versions of the product checking the features.

• Flexibility,
• Management
• VMware interoperability

It's helped us to develop a new platform for virtualization, with a small footprint, and improved our computing power efficiency.

It could be helpful to have a wizard to make the setup routine better, and a wizard to help with the managerial processes to avoid misconfiguration issues.

We've been using a Cisco 6296, 5100 Chassis, B-Series server B200M3, VIC1280 for two years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They are very professional.

Our system used to be based on the usual rack servers, with Dell M1000 based blades.

The hardware setup was easy. The initial setup through the manager requires a deep understanding of the platform.

We implemented it with the assistance of an integrator who were a Cisco partner. I definitely recommended you get professional assistance to help with the initial run phase. It's critically important to provide formal learning to the internal team that will be in charge of the day-to-day operating activities.

I'd recommend that you create a "turn Key" solution pack, including both hardware and platform licensing, and guest licensing. You could also get this by implementing it through re-sellers.

We also looked into HP servers, but decided that Cisco was better in most areas. Combined with Nexus switches, it provides us with a versatile solution for a virtual platform including SAN fabric capability build in, networking flexibility and SDN, and is better to management.

You need to have at least a basic understanding of the product concept and architecture variations in order to better understand use cases and ROI estimation in order to get the initial sizing right, and create the right scaling plan.

Cisco UCS utilizes Service Profiles for server provisioning. These are logical profiles that are comprised of many smaller parts, such as BIOS settings, NIC settings, HBA settings, Firmware packages, boot policies and more. Creating consistency within your compute environment has proven valuable. Having the capability to add chassis and/or blades to my environment with just a few cables, and bringing these servers online with the required settings based on my profile is most valuable. Apply a Service Profile to a new, replace or relocated blade, and Cisco UCS takes care of the rest, provisioning as you expect.

Cisco UCS has reduced our physical footprint, drastically simplified management and created strong partnerships between engineering teams.

Software defects that result in false environmental alarms have been a pain point for us. These defects are not operational or performance impacting, but they do result in many hours troubleshooting to rule out any potential risks.

I've been using it for years.

As long as everything is correctly designed and properly patched, deployment is a breeze with instantiation of VMs on-top of a configured UCS environment possible within just a few hours. This is aggressive scheduling, but it’s absolutely possible given the numerous options available for scripting and automation.

We hit a software defect once that caused a reload of some critical assets. This was immediately resolved and is the only true case of a stability issues I have seen.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Cisco TAC is typically great to work with. UCS has a call home feature that will automatically open TAC cases on your behalf when issues arise. I’d recommend calling in critical cases to ensure timely response.

The initial setup as a first-timer can be overwhelming, but once you complete it, any subsequent setup is straightforward. The biggest thing is making sure you properly design the solution and develop a scalable schema. Take into consideration other environmental variables that require specific configuration, such as hypervisor BIOS settings versus bare-metal BIOS settings.

I recommend having someone experienced with UCS perform the initial design and deployment. This could be someone you have in-house, or someone you contract. You’ll want to make sure your schemas as setup properly, any unusual requirements are handled properly, and profiles are built according to best practices for your particular environment.

Cisco UCS changed the server blade game, converging network and compute into a single profile-based platform. Now with HCI, Cisco is converging storage into UCS as well. I recommend getting in contact with Cisco and one of their channel partners for a whiteboard session, design conversation and potential proof-of-concept. This worked well for me in the past. I have since been capable of designing and implementing Cisco UCS environments without aid from external resources, only asking for design validations.

• Easy to deploy, scale and expand based on a number of server range available.
• Centralization for different resources including network, compute and storage

Any Datacenter or organization implementing UCS-B series will find it easy for its IT team in terms of changes required to add more servers and redundancy.

Perfect device, but only if the GUI is made .NET-based, it will be more great.

I've had no issues with deployment.

I've had no issues with stability.

I've had no issues with scalability.

The VM-FEX, hardware integration with VMware vSphere.

It's faster to provision virtual servers than physical. Also, it has very good orchestration with UCS Director 5.2.

The UCS Manager is written in Java and has many problems after the new Java releases. It should be rewritten in HTML5.

I've used it for one and a half years.

It was not a problem.

It is very stable.

No issues encountered.

4/5

4/5

IBM Blade Servers,was in place previously.

It was straightforward to do it. You need to have expert-level knowledge in LAN, SAN, and servers to be able to do it properly

I did by myself.

No, Cisco UCS was the stuff we wanted.

• Deployment of new blade/host is quick via using hardware profiles
• No ethernet or fiber cabling required for new blades/hosts
• No zoning required to SAN storage for new blades/hosts
• New chassis can be quickly attached to fabric interconnect for deployment

• Faster deployments of new and replacement hardware
• Compact footprint saves valuable space on the rack.

We have used it for over four years.

Deployment was smooth.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

We used standalone servers which were configured in clustered configuration, and switched because we wanted to improve efficiency.

The initial setup was straightforward. For the hardware setup, you do the following

• Non-blocking 10gig fiber lines going to core network switches from fabric interconnect
• Fiber lines for SAN storage to fiber switches from fabric interconnect 
• Converged data (Network & Storage) on 10gig lines from chassis to fabric interconnect
• Blades/hosts use Converged Network Adapters (CNA)

For the configuration using Cisco UCS manager

• Hardware profiles
• Boot from SAN
• Initial storage and network setup

We implemented through a vendor. If you are new to Cisco UCS platform, I would recommend implementing through a vendor.

Plan carefully and purchase adequate licenses with the initial purchase for better pricing.

• Dell
• HP

The features of Cisco UCS that are of the most value to me is the ability to build Service Profiles for servers based on your needs. You can add HBAs and NICs to servers as needed, and you can remove them just as easily. 

Also, with UCS, updating firmware and drivers has been simplified and can be done throughout the system simply by associating new firmware policies to the hardware. You can also run different versions of firmware as needed to support legacy applications.

UCS has made it possible to replace and upgrade servers quickly and easily while keeping things up and running for the enterprise. 

Replacing the Fabric interconnects and IOMs can be done while the system is up and serving production data. You can almost effectively negate downtime from your organization as a result.

I would really like to see an integrated management interface for all the products for FlexPod, as well as a verification tool like Immersive that can give you feedback about your compatibility with FlexPod guidelines.

Get a qualified vendor to help you go through the process, and take some training to get familiar with how things work together.

The ability to scale to multiple blades and multiple blade chassis quickly and easily.

Customers see benefits in the reduced time to deploy virtual servers. The ability to scale out quickly is an example of that.

The management interface in the current version is Java based. I would like to see a move away from Java based management consoles, which I think Cisco has already road-mapped for the UCS product range.

We completed a deployment of this solution in February 2015.

No, the product has been stable.

It is designed to address scalability.

Cisco technical support is always available 24x7. I rate Cisco technical support 10/10.

We specifically implemented UCS to cater specifically for a customer’s Cisco Unified Communication products, which were all running on Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS). The Cisco MCS platform is now End-of-Life, so UCS was the life cycle replacement option. The MCS platform also had limitations with virtualisation which the UCS product suite overcomes. More recently, the customer’s platform services team have recently purchased another Cisco 5108 blade server chassis and more UCS-B blade servers to replace their HP blade server solution.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

Cisco publishes deployment guides which are straightforward to follow. The guides assume some knowledge of LAN, SAN and server administration and deployment.

Probably the Cisco Integrated Management Controller.

Remote access to the server is very useful.

They use LSI for their RAID, while they may be robust RAID controllers, they lack a lot of functionality that Adaptec or HP Smart array.

Two years.

The LSI controller is very "finiky", even though it had deployment software, the only way to successfully configure the RAID was via the boot command line.

No, we haven't had issues post setup.

Probably the RAID card really limits what the servers are capable of if you require storage.

I haven't needed to deal with technical support yet.

We use this as a potential alternative for HP ProLiant servers.

There are some quirks in the setup (e.g. for non Disk servers, you need to go into the CIMC to enable the SD Card for HyperVisor Installs, not the BIOS) but generally its fairly straight forward.

We haven't had a full life span on the Cisco UCS but so far we have not had to do nearly as much firmware maintenance as the HP Servers.

No but we have used HP for a number of years and IBM before that.

These are good servers for SAN environments, I think their Disks (RAID) need a lot of improvement before you consider them as a storage server.

Centralized Management using UCS Manager, and State less Servers.

Scalability, Flexibility to reuse the same Server with different projects multiple OS (VMware ESXi / Centos, Microsoft Windows) just in minutes by creating new service profiles.

Stability of some of the old versions has afew bugs. Although I have to mention that Cisco has been releasing revised versions of Firmware very quickly to fix the bugs.

More then one year

No, but Cisco UCS is a complex system, it is very easy to deploy if you have the knowledge and understanding of the product, I have recently commissioned a new Cisco UCS Datacenter after all the rack and stack its very easy to manage the product via Cisco UCS Manager.

Some of the version of firmware does have issues but Cisco is very good at fixing the bugs and giving new firmware versions.

Cisco UCS is very good with scalability, this is one of the ups of the Cisco UCS and I have used this a lot.

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

I have had few issues when upgrading the firmware and the Techsupport of Cisco TAC was very quick in picking up the issue and resolving it.

I'm happy with the Tech Support.

Dell and HP Rack servers, issues with scalability. Space consuming.

Yes it was easy to setup provided you know the basics of Cisco UCS. I have done the low level design for our new site and it was very straightforward.

When it comes to racking I have to admit the chassis is very heavy with all the components as its a 6U chassis. So make sure you remove all the power supply modules and IOM's and Fans then rack it. Once its placed then you can easily slide everything back and blades into the chassis.

We had used a Cisco Partner and they did a very good job.

HP and IBM

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It is scalable and it controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.