I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I rate the overall solution a five out of ten.

I am an integrator. I work with a group that does migration services. We are hired to augment staff for project implementation and knowledge transfer. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

Owing to Cisco UCS Director's high prices, I would only recommend the product to those who have the budget to afford it.

From a deployment perspective, Cisco UCS Director is easy to deploy on any infrastructure with Cisco systems. The product is quite good and easy to manage.

I feel Cisco UCS Director's quality is okay, but the product's price needs to be reduced. Cisco UCS Director is a product that is good enough to be in the market.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

Overall, I would rate the Cisco UCS Director solution a five out of 10, with one being very poor and 10 being excellent. This is because I have worked on a similar product, VMware. I saw firsthand a lot of things that the other product does better than UCS. The open source developers are huge for the platform, like VMware. In Cisco UCS Director, I think most of the development is done by Cisco themselves or the affiliated partners, so there aren't too many improvements from the integrations perspective.

This is a product that I recommend for others.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is that you have to have patience at the beginning. You cannot rush it.

This is a good product, but improvements never end.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Cisco UCS Director is very easy to deploy, offering strong support. I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

My advice for anybody considering this solution is to first have the vision to convert all of your x86 data center hardware to UCS. Do not add it for a specific use case, such as a cloud manager. Cisco recommends this solution for cloud management, but it should not be done unless you plan to replace all of your hardware with Cisco.

This is a good solution, but I would like to see integration with other hardware vendors.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to first consider and understand the use case. Think about your high-level design, the business requirements, how scalable and how flexible it has to be, and what your own availability is.

Overall, I think that this is a very good product, although nothing is perfect. There are still some small improvements that can be made to make it better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I think this solution should be considered an eight out of ten. To get a ten from me and for what I do, there has to be more flexibility in the API. I'm tired of being the tip of the sword. Enhance programming and programmability.

As I said, I don't know if there's somebody else who does something like Cisco's UCS management. So I think my capabilities kinda get pigeonholed a little bit.

I am very happy with the product, and we will be pushing it to its limits as we go forward.

My management team likes the fact that we are now more agile. When we have new business, we no longer have to wait for weeks to get systems into production. It is now a matter of days, or sometimes hours, from the time we receive shipments at a data center to the time it's live in production. Without UCS director it wouldn't be possible.

As your environment grows, manageability becomes a problem. When you're trying to deploy rapidly, and your goal is to get to market as quickly as possible, you need to be agile. UCS Director allows us to be agile and deploy on all sorts of systems, both for VMware and for non-VMware systems. Anything that has to do with hardware, we can manage with UCS Director. It works well for our organization, so far.

Is this solution a fit for everybody? It depends on how large and how complex the environment is. If you are only managing ten systems then I wouldn't tell you to invest in Cisco UCS director because you're not going to get the same benefits that I'm getting from it. It just depends on the environment, the situation, and the size.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to recognize that sometimes you need outside help to understand what you're trying to do, in terms of your end goal. If you just jump into it, you might not realize the full investment. As long as you know what you're trying to get, and you're a fit, then I would recommend this solution. Outside of that, I wouldn't tell just anybody to try UCS Director because it's not for everybody.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My advice is to look at the features that you are looking for. 

If you are looking for central management and a self-service catalog, and are predominantly in a mix of the cloud as well as on-premises architecture, then you should look at UCS Director as a solution.

There are some advantages offered, such as:

• Adaptive provisioning, which ensures real-time availability, capacity planning, and internal policy. 
• Dynamic capacity management, which provides continuous monitoring of the infrastructure and resources. 
• Multiple hypervisor support, which is very important.
• Computing management, which allows you faster provisioning, providing you with monitoring and management on a physical and bare-metal server.

Before you do the sizing and the requirement, ensure that you go through with the compatibility metrics of UCS Director before you invest.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I would recommend this solution to others because it simplifies a lot of tasks via orchestration.

I rate Cisco UCS Director a nine out of ten.