Cisco UCS Manager Reviews

My company uses Cisco UCS Manager for managing Cisco UCS Blade and rack server, the physical server, for the virtual environment, Vmware. Suppose you have five hundred blades or more in the organization. It'll be complex to manage individual blades for maintenance purposes. This is where Cisco UCS Manager comes in, as it helps maintain all physical blades in a centralized manner.

What I like most about Cisco UCS Manager is the ease of administration. It also allows the central management of maintenance, installation, and configuration activities. It's easier to set up, maintain, and configure the environment when you're using Cisco UCS Manager.

What's lacking in Cisco UCS Manager is the performance dashboard. If a blade has any performance issues, you should be able to create a dashboard on Cisco UCS Manager. Currently, this feature isn't present, so it's an area for improvement in Cisco UCS Manager.

Cisco UCS Manager has an alert feature, so you can configure alerts when an error occurs, but what's missing is the alert for blade performance issues, such as CPU, memory, or network issues. For example, if the CPU utilization goes beyond eighty or ninety percent, the Cisco UCS Manager should be able to alert you, but that's not available now.

I want to add more chassis to help with scalability in the next release to Cisco UCS Manager. The platform also needs performance monitoring for the hardware.

I've been using Cisco UCS Manager for more than ten years.

Cisco UCS Manager is a stable platform.

You can scale Cisco UCS Manager, but there's a limitation because one Cisco UCS Manager can have twenty chassis, with twenty chassis having eight blades. Hence, there's a maximum of one hundred and sixty blades per chassis. If you want to go beyond that number, you have to get a new Cisco UCS Manager, which means purchasing another license.

Cisco UCS Manager has excellent technical support that's ready to provide support whenever my company needs it. Support is responsive and knowledgeable, so I'm rating it a five out of five.

Cisco has a new solution called Cisco Intersight. It's a cloud solution that has many improved features. It's a good solution, and my company is motivated to use it instead of Cisco UCS Manager.

The initial setup for Cisco UCS Manager wasn't too complex, but it wasn't easy either. Anybody who wants to set it up needs an excellent understanding of Cisco architecture.

On a scale of one to five, my rating for the setup is a three.

The pricing for Cisco UCS Manager is okay for its market, so it's a four out of five for me.

In my company, twenty people use Cisco UCS Manager. As it's a stable environment, whenever there's any maintenance, anyone available to take on the task will handle it. Maintenance is on an individual team basis.

My rating for Cisco UCS Manager is seven out of ten.

My company is a partner of Cisco UCS Manager.

We use Cisco UCS Manager to manage the servers associated with it, monitor or manage firmware upgrades, and push policies. It's like the brain of the UCS system, in which users can log into Cisco UCS Manager and control all the infrastructure below it. All the configurations for servers and Fabric Interconnect can be done by the Cisco UCS Manager. Nowadays, users are opting for a cloud solution instead of using Cisco UCS Manager.

The solution's firmware upgrade has improved our operational efficiency. When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time. We can have a template service profile that can be applied to any number of servers. We just need to clone it and apply it. In case of a vulnerability, we just need to go to the template and change it. It's all policy-driven, which makes the admin's life much easier. Also, it will be consistent across all the infrastructure servers.

The solution's pricing is high and could be reduced. Compared to other systems, memory failure in Cisco UCS Manager is much higher.

I have been using Cisco UCS Manager for six to seven years.

Initially, we faced a lot of memory failure with the solution. After some firmware updates, it's stable overall.

We mainly work with medium and enterprise customers for Cisco UCS Manager. Cisco UCS Manager is scalable enough.

The solution’s technical support is very good.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution can be implemented by two people in one day.

We need to take a license for each port, which amounts to a big sum.

The solution's SDK and API can be integrated with ServiceNow for ticketing for any purpose. The solution's unified management interface is a central point of management that allows us to manage switches, blades, and storage connectors. One person is enough to maintain the solution.

The speed of the network interface has been 100 G since day one. The network is scalable, and GPU nodes can be added seamlessly. Cisco is claiming to support water cooling in the near future. The solution can be easily integrated with other tools and platforms.

Compared to Dell, Cisco UCS Manager provides straightforward configuration, reusable policies, and flexibility. Dell lacks a proper GUI for configuring everything. Cisco has only one GUI, which allows us to configure everything, including the network server and server profile. Before releasing each model, Cisco should conduct proper testing or engineering validation to ensure that the customer doesn't face any issues initially.

Overall, I rate Cisco UCS Manager a nine out of ten.

Cisco UCS Manager helps us manage all the blades so we can apply quality to templates. Recently, we have installed VMware vCenter from where we manage it. Cisco UCS Manager gives us control of all the blades with a maximum of 160 blades in a single UCS Manager. From there we can manage all the hardware related issues, like upgrades.

Cisco UCS Manager is a simple solution. Their technical support is good because whenever we need to generate a technical log, we can generate it from the console itself. It gives ease of management. Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it offers a GUI interface and a CLI. We use Cisco UCS PowerTool to manage through.

In terms of what can be improved, the help dashboard could. Usually, we use vCenter. If I go to an option called Performance Monitoring, it gives us metrics in real-time.

The performance dashboard should be out in front of the UCS Manager - as soon as you log in you should see the dashboard. That should be improved. Another thing is the inventory management dashboard. Inventory is like a configuration database. So we should also be able to pull all the details which can give answers so we do not wonder about the HCI data.

Also, scalability could be improved in this solution.

Lastly, it should be more user-friendly because Cisco is a bit of a complex solution. So we are running the VMware environment and it has added capabilities of management.

Mostly it is stable. Sometimes when we upgrade there's a bug or something like that. Then we involve Cisco for the technical support and they help. I've been always grateful because whenever we need them, they are always available.

Cisco UCS Manager is not a scalable solution because once you have 160 blades, it cannot be expanded more. It has a limit of a maximum of 20 chassis which can hold up to 160 blades. Then, if we need 161 blades, we have to install another Cisco UCS Manager to manage it. That is not expandable. If you have a large volume of blades to support, like 1000 blades, we'd have to divide 1000 by 160 and that will be the number of UCS Managers in our environment.

I've been in touch with them. They are very good at the technical level.

The initial setup is straightforward and not so complex.

I think it is a 20 minute job to mount UCS Manager.

I implemented it myself.

Now people have many more options. If you're talking about HCI, Cisco has it. They have their own product called Cisco HyperFlex. Though if you are looking for a single short solution then you probably will not find it here.

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate Cisco UCS Manager a seven.

From a usability and functionality perspective, Cisco UCS Manager is very good.

Cisco UCS Manager is slightly more complicated to deploy and requires technical expertise that small organizations probably won't have. Cisco UCS Manager is expensive and it could be made cheaper.

Cisco UCS Manager should have a simplified deployment in the sense of not having multiple machines, demilitarized zones, and on-premise options. Also, the ability to configure, maintain, and support could be more intuitive and user-friendly.

The organization has been using Cisco UCS Manager for about a year. I've only joined the organization about three to four months ago.

I rate Cisco UCS Manager a seven or eight out of ten for stability.

The scalability of Cisco UCS Manager is very good. We haven't needed to scale that at any stage. Fifty users are using Cisco UCS Manager in our company and it is not extensively used.

The deployment took about six to eight months.

The deployment of Cisco UCS Manager was done by an integrator.

We haven't seen a return on investment for our company because the use case wasn't properly evaluated at the outset. So it's not that Cisco UCS is bad. I have seen Cisco UCS in other organizations where it's been extensively used, and there has been a return on investment. So this is more just a misaligned project.

Cisco UCS Manager’s annual licensing fee is expensive. The solution and the equipment required to get the functionality going for Cisco UCS Manager are costly. So we've got a host out of a hosted data center, and we have to put it into a demilitarized zone, which adds to the total cost of ownership.

Our usage of Cisco UCS Manager is minimal. We're just using it as a telephony system.

Cisco tends to over complicate all of their solutions. Cisco UCS Manager is not that flexible. Cisco technologies are always cumbersome, and you need a specialist's skills to use their products. That's why we used an integrator to deploy it and couldn't do anything in-house. So, from that perspective, it limits flexibility.

Cisco UCS Manager virtually needs no maintenance. Since it's being deployed, it's pretty robust, which is typical for Cisco. If you implement it correctly, it is stable and resilient.

Before opting for Cisco UCS Manager, do your evaluation upfront properly, and make sure you understand your use case. Also, look at alternatives from the perspective of support and the complexity of deployment. Those were the key areas we probably didn't look at, and as the project went on, we discovered the pitfalls.

Overall, I rate Cisco UCS Manager a seven or eight out of ten.

We primarily usually use UCS Manager where we've installed from the ESXI Host and are hosting multiple UCM's.

There are occasions when we have or have had one of the VM licenses expiring and that required us to quickly create a new implementation of some issues. The solution makes the process easy.

If I'm playing with a new host, the most valuable aspect is that those servers can get a host up and running in quickly. 

I found it a bit of a challenge to get training on UCSM. I've been trying to get that for some time now. I feel like I have to figure out a lot of things myself. For years I've to log calls with support whenever I've got challenges that I cannot resolve. If I had some training or more manuals, I'd be better able to handle more things on my own.

They should work to simplify the server creation template.  

The solution feels very stable. I seldom get UCS Manager related issues.

The solution is highly scalable, mainly because of the templates that make it easy for you to actually edit on the system.

Technical support is good, but I find it best when I log a call when the team in America is working so that it gets assigned to someone there. European support isn't as good as the US support.

I wasn't a part of the original setup team, so I can't speak to its level of difficulty. You only need one administrator to handle the solution once it's implemented.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

It's a good solution, as long as you can maneuver admin paths and are competent in running the day to day support tasks.

The solution is a bit complicated and complex, but the trade-off is you have a lot of functionality.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

I work for a service provider and we deploy this product for our customers. This is a tool to manage Cisco UCS devices: data servers, networking devices, or whatever Cisco produces under the UCS umbrella. 

If I wasn't using Cisco UCS Manager as a centralized console, I would be managing each and every server individually. UCS Manager gives me the ability to manage them all through a single piece of software.

I can deploy something in my 50-odd servers all in one go, in parallel, whereas if I was to do that individually, it could be a nightmare. I look at a single pane of glass to see how all of my hardware is doing.

There are quite a few components when it comes to operating servers, and the process has to be done in a sequence. If UCS provided a functionality to set up all of my sequences in one go, for example, I want to apply this piece of software now, and once this is done, I want to apply this piece of software, it would be great. I want to be able to schedule multiple sequential updates in one go.

Also, I've been trying the solution on a mobile device, and it doesn't work that great. They could probably do with redesigning the interface so it works for different device sizes and resolutions.

I have been using this solution for around eight years.

I rate the stability as an eight or nine out of ten. It's very stable.

I would rate the scalability as an eight out of ten. It's quite scalable. The solution is mostly used by the server administrators and network administrators. 

Cisco's tech support is a ten out of ten. They know their job well. 

Before, when we were working on Dell or HP servers, we would have to use individual remote management software for every server. HP OneView came in when Cisco UCS did. They're a competitor of Cisco UCS that also offered centralized management, but they were not as good. They could never do what Cisco UCS could do in terms of simplification and ease of use.

The setup is quite difficult. It's not a cake walk. I would rate it as a five out of ten. 

The deployment time really depends on the size. For the enterprise level, it takes a couple of days to do a complete Cisco UCS setup. However, if we were to just install the UCS Manager as a software, then it would take an hour or two.

I work for a managed service provider. For small customers, we get an expert in there and use an external person within the service provider to help. For large customers, we have employees who already have that expertise.

The staff required for deployment or maintenance depends purely on the size of the deployment. You could do it with one or two people or you could have a big team.

If you were using, for example, HP hardware, you would have more hardware faults and you'd be spending time having the parts replaced. Even though they might be under warranty, it's still a waste of time and tech efforts to have the parts replaced. Whereas with UCS, I save that time because I hardly ever see my good UCS setup having hardware failures.

Cisco UCS is more expensive than Dell and HP, but it is more reliable. I see less issues and it's quite stable. They don't do component pricing, so you get everything you need in a bundle. 

This solution is stable, agile, scalable, and Cisco provides good support.

My advice to somebody looking into this solution is to spend good time in designing the setup in terms of architecture. Have a good data center design architect to make sure they design a good solution. Take the setup slow because that's where you need to spend most of your time. When your setup is good and well-documented, it will make the admin's job easier.

I rate this solution as a seven out of ten.

I have experience with Cisco InterSite, but only for a proof of concept (POC). I used it to demonstrate its functionality to our clients.

Creating UCS service profiles for quickly deploying servers and replicating that configuration to another server makes it easier for deployment.

There are options that could make configuration and administration easier. Improving functionalities similar to InterSite within UCS Manager would be beneficial.

The initial setup is really easy. I deployed an infrastructure with about eight hosts in maybe six hours. This includes installing the chassis in the rack, installing the blade, and making connections.

I performed the deployment activities physically, including configuration. I usually handle these tasks alone.

Cisco is the most expensive compared to other vendors like Dell and HP when it comes to data center solutions.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The interface is ergonomic and native. We can use UCS Manager to do all the configurations for the servers, including storage, networking, and all the other components we need inside the fabric. It's simple and flexible. 

Another nice feature is the inventory view of the system. It has an excellent dashboard for all the networks and network storage, such as SAN and VLAN, and the server chassis. It gives you a topology of all your solutions, which is helpful when troubleshooting. For example, when there is an issue in your chassis, you can see it in the dashboard. 

The integration with other solutions could be better. I think Cisco can only integrate using Intersight. There is a second interface available as a SaaS platform, in the cloud, or on-premise. It's based on the Redfish protocol, which is standard for all the B-series servers in the market. We can integrate other solutions using API. 

Cisco is somewhat inflexible. It's not full HTML or XML. It uses a Java-based language, so you need a browser that supports Java. Intersight has a full web interface, and it's open to other systems with the API. It can just generate API from the side of other solutions. For example, Splunk and SIEMs can integrate with UCS via Intersight.

I have been using UCS Manager for 14 years.

UCS Manager is straightforward to set up. The configuration is simple and it's much easier to deploy than other solutions on the market. UCS Manager is on-premise, but Cisco Intersight is a cloud-based solution. The initial setup takes about an hour, but we need to set up the system and configure the connections to the LAN, SAN, etc. 

I rate Cisco UCS Manager five out of 10. It's a good solution because it's unified. It's not separate components in the architecture. For example, in other solutions, we have a fabric connecting the LAN switches, a Zion input-output module, and other subscriptions between the chassis and the LAN switch.