Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Reviews

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.

We use this solution for clients who has issues with their infrastructure.

HyperFlex is compatible with VMware. This is good since we are also a VMware partner.

In addition, the product is compatible with Hyper-V, which is another good solution.

It is a high availability solution.

The solution is stable.

The solution can scale up and out.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is very easy.

The product is expensive. Other solutions are cheaper.

Cisco has the best solution for hyper-convergence.

Manufacturing and logistics software controls, ERP and document management servers, and database production and development servers.

Less rack space, decreased power and cooling costs, overall information technology team efficiency, and a single point of management.

The software defines networking, storage, and processing. Flash acceleration feature for most files.

Deployment scripts can be improved. Several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works.

Our primary use case of this solution is for VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, for our community college.

It ultimately provides a virtual desktop so that we can backup user data a lot more easily. In the past, it was all a straight desktop computer so if your desktop dies, all your data would die as well.

In terms of it being flexible for various projects, it does seem to lend itself to other applications, for example, our VMware, as well as servers that we may want to bring up under the HyperFlex solution so we may go in that direction sometime in the future.

It has the potential of actually being a six million dollar impact to the college because it replaces people's computers. Until we start to transfer users over to it we really won't know how much of that six million dollars is savings for us.

I don't know if it's lowered the deployment time per se because we really haven't gotten to the point where we added shelves or added servers to it. We're expecting for that to be a simple process given what Cisco claims it will do. Ultimately we're expecting no downtime for that.

The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system. It saves money in the long-run. 

We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users.

The stability is great but ultimately we've noticed the updates and upgrades take a bit of an impact on the solution. More so, having to reboot the solution and having to restart it. While it is stable, rebooting it for updates isn't always convenient. Ultimately, just like any organization, we would do that on off hours whether it be weekends, nights, or whatnot. But that costs money because you have to have staff on weekends, nights and whatever overtime they have to account for.

Scalability is just as they predicted. It combined the frontend servers with the backend storage. While it is a little cumbersome to learn, it is scalable to be able to add more shelves if I need more memory or additional servers very easily. It does scale nicely.

I'm pretty neutral about technical support right now given that we're still setting up the solution to some degree. The support is great, as long as there is a maintenance contract in place. But because the overall solution is still rather new, using knowledge base or just generic knowledge base out on the internet is not as prevalent as I would like.

We are a Dell shop. We looked at HP but ultimately because of the features that Cisco brought with the HyperFlex solution, we felt that that was a superior product to everyone else.

The initial setup was straightforward. We simply wanted to understand how the two worked together given that the claim is that it's supposed to be easy to combine both storage and servers.

We used a consultant for the deployment that Cisco suggested. Because the solution is rather new to us the scenario was pleasant. They knew what they were doing but I felt like the knowledge transfer could have been a lot better.

I would rate it a high eight or nine out of ten because of the features and functions that it comes with that the competitors really can't do just yet. The advantage I think so far has been that Cisco developed the entire solution from scratch as opposed to other solution providers like HP and Dell who are still trying to reinvent existing solutions.

I think it's a viable solution if you have a need to cut down on your overall implementation costs on hardware. This does a good job of combining both software and hardware.

We use the solution to combine and migrate regular servers to a hyper-converged infrastructure.

The solution works faster and is easy to use than any regular system. Also, its fabric interconnect provides flexibility for the system to scale up.

The solution's most valuable feature is the high availability of the system.

The solution's price could be affordable.

We have been using the solution for around two years.

I rate the solution's stability as a ten.

We have 1000 users of the solution in our organization. We plan to increase the usage as well.

I rate its scalability as an eight.

The solution's technical support is excellent.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. You have to follow the configuration guide.

The solution is highly priced compared to other vendors.

I recommend it to others and rate it as a ten.

I use HyperFlex for high-performance infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is full integration with Cisco API and UCS, which means you can have complete networking and storage from Cisco.

HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two. In the next release, Cisco should include full integration with other virtualization vendors like Nutanix, the same way they do with VMware.

I've been using HyperFlex for a year.

HyperFlex is very stable because it has complete solutions for networking and computing from Cisco.

HyperFlex is very scalable because you can scale up by increasing the number of nodes and scale out by increasing the number of discs in the storage.

Most of Cisco's products come with warrants and SmartNet, so if you have an issue, the customer interface allows you to rate it, and the technical team will respond based on the critical level.

Positive

The setup is very easy, I'd rate it five out of five.

HyperFlex is relatively expensive, but you get good value for money.

I would give HyperFlex a rating of nine 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.

We are using HyperFlex for heavy workloads and virtual machines which are on a separate network.

• Past deployments
• The possibility to share the workload. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them.
• The product works quickly.

We are working with a lot of different technologies and trying to manage them with one tool. The API could be improved for better integration with other systems. For example, the integration to VMware could be better.

We haven't had any downtime. It is absolutely stable.

The scalability is good. We use the nodes that we bought, and they have really scaled out.

Cisco technical support often makes things too complicated. We have easy problems, but they want to WebEx and constantly testing. In the end, we have to exchange a disk and everything is okay. In the beginning, we said the disk is defect, but they want us to test and retest, before acknowledging the disk is defect and we can exchange it. That is a problem for me.

We worked for years with HPE services. We didn't see that they developed, so we looked for other vendors. In the end, we decided on Cisco and are now testing some Cisco technologies. The main technology for us is UCS. HyperFlex was an idea which came from our account manager. I said, "Okay, we can test it." We have a use case. Now, we are working with it.

From day one, it worked. The initial setup was okay.

Cisco helped us to deploy and integrate. Our experience with them was fine.

We are testing it on the slowest workloads. We think by sharing the hardware with several applications that we can save money.

We considered all the vendors. In the end, Cisco checked all the boxes.

At the moment, Cisco is a good vendor, as far as networking solutions. I connect the servers to the network, and the compatibility is good.

We haven't tested the new container functionality. I hope it's good, because this is very important for us.