How Flexible is FlexPod?

Rating: 10 out of 10

April 26, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FlexPod is the backbone of the city. We use it for all departments and services within the city. It gave us a single point of management for our servers and the ability to move or migrate physical server profiles from one server to another. [It gives] us a very consistent and reliable experience.

Pros

Single Pane of Glass Server Administration.
Ease of firmware upgrades.
Incredible support when you have an issue. The Cisco/NetApp/VMware FlexPod support teams work together and drive your issues down to the root cause.

Cons

Initial setup and config. You won't do it by yourself without going to a class. No wizards here. Very complex till you get used to it.
iSCSI boot could be easier. Lots of ways to implement it, but no real definitive guide.
Could use better documentation with specific examples. Would be nice if it had an initial setup wizard.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenarios where downtime isn't possible.
Being able to move a physical server config to another physical server within the FlexPod is a god send.
Hardware fails, we all know that.
It happens, by being able to move a profile from one blade to another, it allows you to quickly and easily restore service while waiting for hardware to arrive onsite to repair/replace the failed component.

Wesley Harris

Senior IT Systems Engineer in Information Technology at City of Avondale (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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FlexPod makes private cloud easy and profitable

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize FlexPod with VMware for both virtual and physical hosts in our data center. Our primary usage is a private cloud offering via the VMware hosts. My team sells back hosting services to other departments within the company, allowing them to get 24/7 support and hosting without having to pay for IT staff out of their own budgets, while ensuring that the support team, being members of the same company, have a vested interest in providing up time and service that an external provider might not have.

Pros

Service profile portability - Utilizing san boot, if we have any issues with a physical blade, it is simple to move that Service profile to a new blade. This is also useful when moving chassis between racks or migrating service profiles to new hardware.
Single point of management - we are able to get all VLANs and VSANs trunked to the FlexPod fabric interconnects and then the server etam can handle mapping whatever VLANs are required to each new server as it is built without having to open a new set of tickets with networking.
Performance - We are able to run a massive virtual load on these blades as we have 256 cores and 6TB in 6RU in our current configuration (and can go up to 352 cores and 12TB with larger processors and DIMMs). This type of CPU and memory density, backed up by 40GB based backplane, allows for high density virtualization.

Cons

KVM control of the blades still requires Java. Avocent is using HTML5 now, and it would be nice if the KVM console for these UCS blades could too.
Price - Like any Cisco product, there are cheaper options. They aren't nearly as fully featured, but at times, it would be nice if UCS could be a bit cheaper.

Likelihood to Recommend

FlexPod is great for mid to large size companies, where the flexibility and depth of a traditional SAN and high performance servers is required. For smaller companies, it might make more sense to go with a hyper converged solution such as Hyperflex or Nutanix (both of which can still run on Cisco UCS servers, but would not be making use of Netapp storage), to meet the requirements in a smaller footprint.

Joel Sprague, CCIE

Principal Systems Engineer in Information Technology at JWS Consult (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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Cisco FlexPod Reviews & Insights