Cisco UCS - good or bad?

[philipbbeadman]

Hello;

Our organization is considering going to a Cisco UCS solution from a standard big IT vendor rack mount setup for our ESXi hosts. I'm curious what the vmware community's experience has been with UCS. Good experiences? Bad experiences? Gotchas? Caveats?

much appreciated.

Philip Beadman

[VirtuallyMikeB]

Check out Brad Hedlun's blog as well as Colin Lynch's. Theyre both rock stars who've had a lot of success with the platform.  It's quickly becoming the leader in blade servers worldwide and the US, with many differences from HP.

I'm newer to UCS coming from the rack server world and I love it.  Less cabling, better firmware management, better management in general actually.  Many nice integrations with Cisco gear like Nexus (7k,5k,2k,1000v)

[JonathanKohler]

Philip,

Disclaimer, I work for a Cisco reseller.

Cisco UCS was built around VMware virtualization, and there are a lot of complementary aspects to UCS that make it really great, such as vNIC Templates (makes your network configuration standardized), Service Profiles (standardizes your server configuration, like BIOS, boot order, etc), and a full emulator (to learn and play with).

Those are just two of the laundry list of "good things" about Cisco UCS, too many to type up here and really do them justice.

If you want to learn about how UCS works, which I find helps with decisions like this, check out this video series.

http://bradhedlund.com/2011/03/08/cisco-ucs-networking-videos-in-hd-updated-improved/

These are short videos, easy to consume, and they take you through a lot of the ins and outs of UCS.

Note that when people talk about Cisco UCS, they are most generally talking about UCS B-Series, which is the blade form factor. That is not the only form factor they come in, you can get all of the same "cool things" with rack mount servers as well.

That said, Cisco UCS isn't your typical "throw it in" type of server, which I find to be peoples biggest sticking points up front. That said, like any new technology, there is a touch of a learning curve, and once you get over it, you are going to love it.

If you want to talk about this more, feel free to reach out via PM, and I'd be happy to chat with you.

Jon

[Ramesh Dhanaraj]

go for it, since it has stateless computing option, it's good for production.

[brewd]

I've been working with UCS since firmware 1.2 was released and have had the experience of managing and maintaining about 6 separate systems.

UCS does have some nice features which make building ESXi hosts much quicker than rack mounts for example.

The wire once cabling and NIC templates does take lot of pain away from configuring all those switch ports and NICs. This is a clear positive.

However I do find that doing something as simple as fitting a blade into a slot is clunky and temperamental.

VMware HCL is a bit of a minefield also making upgrades to ESXi far too complicated. NIC/HBA drivers on specific ESXi/UCS FW versions in particular should be approached with care.

We've had no such complications with HP blade centres. They just work.

[shane1973]

I went from supporting HP Gen1-Gen8 blades in a C7000 enclosure to supporting Cisco UCS.  Without rambling on I will just say I like the UCS better. I have not had any experience with a hardware failure on the Cisco side yet, but my experience with HP was horrible. I had a motherboard in a blade go bad and it required 3 total visits before I got it fixed correctly. Sad thing is it didn't fail right away after being 'fixed'. It survived some  testing over a couple days then failed in the middle of the night on the first day a production server was migrated to it.

Another neat feature of Cisco is the UCS emulator that you can download as an .ova file and import into vSphere. It has some limitations (does not import service profiles from your live environment) but overall it can be a useful tool.

As a previous user said, the UCS was developed with VMware in mind.  Cisco, VMware, and EMC were partnered up in a venture (VCE), but EMC bought out their interest a while ago.

[SDMatt]

We've had UCS in our environment for about a year now.. we have no plans to expand our inital deployment, and in all likelyhood we'll be retireing it soon.

We had the option to go all in with it as we expand or go another direction. We were not impressed.

I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone.

BTW - deployment was handled by a Cisco partner. Our lack of satifiaction is not based upon a lack of ability to use the product.

[mikejroberts]

Been using UCS for over a year now and don't care for it either.  We have actually had more hardware issues with UCS than with Dell rack mounts. If you can take advantage of service profiles then it probably is a good fit, but it introduces too much complexity into simple environments and it is not cheap. Firmware updates take about 30 minutes per blade and there isn't native vCenter integration in UCS Manager to help automate firmware deployments.  You need to put hosts into maintenance mode and shut them down on your own.  This makes hardware maintenance time consuming.  Others may have figured out how to script it, but I don't have to do any scripting with my Dell servers using the Dell vCenter Plugin.  UCS Manager is clumsy and needs a rewrite.  I love the concept, just not the complexity, reliability, and lack of integration.

[CoolRam]

Please do read about this article

Network Instruments® | The EYE, August 2010