Cisco Intersight

Score9.3 out of 10

108 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cisco Intersight?

Cisco Intersight is an operations platform that helps IT operations teams control and automate Cisco UCS, converged, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Intersight consolidates and automates infrastructure lifecycle management from data centers to the edge in one solution delivered as-a-service.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of the Intersight dashboard, which provides out-of-the box summaries of real-time health and performance data across data center and edge infrastructure. Users can customize the dashboard with a library of widgets to quickly see information that's most important to them.

Screenshot of the security advisories and field notices that alert users about endpoint devices in their environment that are impacted along with recommended resolution.

Screenshot of the Topology Views that let users quickly identify any UCS domain connectivity issues thorugh a visual representation.

Screenshot of an example of the automated workflows that users can create, using Intersight's drag-and-drop workflow designer and library of tasks and workflows.

Screenshot of an example of the aggregated and visualized metrics that are collected for fabric interconnects, chassis, and servers to monitor devices, optimize performance, identify bottlenecks, and proactively address any potential issues.

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Screenshot of the Intersight dashboard, which provides out-of-the box summaries of real-time health and performance data across data center and edge infrastructure. Users can customize the dashboard with a library of widgets to quickly see information that's most important to them.

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

20.4%

28 installations of 137

#2 most frequent

Manufacturing

14.6%

20 installations of 137

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

13.9%

19 installations of 137

Mitch Kumar (CCIE-DC)View profile

Sr Solutions Architect in Customer Service at Froedtert Health (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Use Intersight to manage and monitor our large foot print of Cisco UCS blades and rack servers. It is one view dash.

Pros

Able to provision pools and policies and provision server workloads quickly and easily.

Cons

able to include third party servers and devices
send alerts on critical events and as resources are depleted and under utilized.
SaaS solution that is the best of breed.
easily able to alerts of pro-active errors

Return on Investment

ROI is much better
easy to provision new servers
get alerts on critical items

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365

Patrick Bullard

Sr Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Centene Corporation (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Intersight is now our primary pane of glass for managing our fabric interconnects and compute nodes.

Pros

Flexibility in provisioning systems
Ability to integrate workflows from Terraform
Always seems highly available

Cons

Navigation to and from objects does not feel as intuitive as UCS Central
Reduce the number of shallow discoveries upon policy application
Provide better insight into roadblocks when upgrading firmware on Fabric Interconnects

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are just beginning to migrated from UCS Central to Cisco Intersight. We will be using it to manage our UCS Infrastructure.

Pros

Modern console
Fully supported
Latest technology

Cons

Support more features for UCSM mode FI's
More robust migration tools

Return on Investment

A positive image is now being able to deploy the latest supported systems
A negative image is the time and effort to move to Cisco Intersight from UCS Central

Alternatives Considered

Cisco UCS Manager

Other Software Used

Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued), Cisco UCS Series, Cisco UCS Manager

Gerald Pellegrini

Infrastructure Architect in Information Technology at MED-EL (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Cisco Intersight with a Cisco UCS Blade 9K for configuration and monitoring.

Pros

Configuring via Powershell
Change configuration
Updates

Cons

Monitoring
Usability via the GUI
Mobile App

Return on Investment

Positive security implementation
Negative lack of monitoring

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using Cisco UCS in legacy UMM (UCSM managed mode) for over 13 years. When Cisco released a newer generation of product (Cisco UCS-X), we were steered in the direction of Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and domains in Intersight Managed Mode. We use Cisco UCS domains in UMM to give us a single pane of glass of all our servers and domains, even though in UMM the domain is read-only. The base (free) features in Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service give us all the features we need for our legacy domains (Connected TAC, auto Support Request generation and TAC's ability to extract log files). For the domains that we have built in UMM and then transitioned to IMM, the IMM Transition Tool has been indispensable. We found it easier to transition an existing domain with settings that have been in use for years, than configuring policies and profiles from scratch. We heavily rely on Cisco PowerTool commandlets to extract and configure settings on our UMM domains and service profiles and were concerned that we had to adopt usage of the Intersight API to get feature equivalency. This ended up not being an issue in Intersight Managed Mode, since all profiles (domain, server, chassis, etc) are associated with updating templates for each, and consume policies which can be reused. Being "nudged" to use server updating templates (this is the only option, whereas in UMM and Cisco UCS Central we always used initial templates only) allowed for a high level of standardisation in our footprint.

Pros

Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Cons

It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.

Return on Investment

(Disclaimer - as a systems engineer, I do not have any hard numbers) For our compute refresh, we have been able to rapidly deploy a large number of servers in a much smaller time frame than what we used to in UMM.
Our domains running in IMM (native Intersight mode) are much more standardised than those that are still running in UCSM Mode.
Configuration drift is easier to identify.

Alternatives Considered

Dell PowerEdge

Other Software Used

VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, Cisco UCS Manager

Usability

Microsoft System Center

Red Hat CloudForms

Cisco Intersight

What is Cisco Intersight?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Most Frequent Users

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Manufacturing

Finance and Insurance

Reviews

Intersight - what it means and how to benefit as a customer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Other Software Used