Help with Cisco Intersight Threshold

[dondougl]

Hi Team,

If we have a customer renewing services, can we give them a standalone Intersight for free?  If so, what is the product buy threshold?

Best,

Donna

[jvanewyk]

This depends on what you are looking for.

Cisco Intersight - SaaS version - does have some offerings that are available without a license purchase when customers purchase Cisco UCS or HyperFlex servers. These features include inventory, alerts, and Connected TAC. You can find more details about supported systems and features that are included in the paid licenses at https://intersight.com/help/saas/supported_systems#supported_hardware_systems_and_software_versions.

Best regards,

Jacob Van Ewyk

UCS Management Product Manger

[Riaan van Niekerk]

Cisco makes it virtually impossible to find out which features are included in the Base tier (effectively free, included if servers are under active maintenance), especially after the license change from 4 tiers (incl. Base & Premier) to only Essentials and Advantage. After lots of digging, I found this Cisco Live presentation from 2020 https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/emea/docs/2020/pdf/BRKINI-2534.pdf, page 12

Base – Included with each UCS Server purchase• No orderable part number. Simply go to https://www.intersight.com and log in using your
cisco.com user ID.
• Global monitoring of health and inventory status
• User customizable dashboard
• Virtual Keyboard-Video-Mouse (vKVM)
• Tagging and basic search
• Context launch of element managers (UCS Manager, IMC, HyperFlex Connect, and UCS
Director)
• Simplified Cisco HyperFlex installation and upgrades
• Connected TAC: Support Log Collection, Open Case, Support Contract Status
• Roll Based Access Control, Single Sign-On (SAML), Multi-Factor Authentication

(I assume that the above is still valid, and none of these features were “folded” into the Essentials tier license)

We were looking at the Virtual Appliance for our brownfields UCS Managed Mode domains, but because you need Intersight Essentials license as a minimum to use the Virtual Appliance, licensing our 800 server brownfields environment and most of the features we need are in the Base tier. It was a bit more work to get proxy access organised across 40+ domains, but worth the effort.

All our greenfields UCS-X domains, we will be switching from UCS Managed Mode to Intersight Managed Mode with Essentials license (we already have the licensing).

[Sandeep Kumar]

Cisco Intersight has only 2 license tiers(after the license simplification last year): Essential and Advantage

For Intersight SAAS:

- We need an Essential license (minimum) for all M7 and higher generation servers.

- Exception: We have certain basic features available for M6 and earlier servers without any licensing. The features are documented here:

https://intersight.com/help/saas/getting_started/licensing_requirements/lic_infra#cisco_ucs_servers

For Virtual Appliances(CVA/PVA):

- We need an Essential license (minimum) for all servers.

[Riaan van Niekerk]

Thank you, Sandeep. Glad to see there is an official resource for what is included in the free/base/unlicensed tier. I compared the list of what is listed in the page you proivded

• Global Monitoring of Health and Inventory Status
• Integration with Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC)
• User Customizable Dashboard
• Search and Tagging
• Context launch of Element Managers
• Support Contract Status
• Remote Management and vKVM
• IP Access Management
• Proactive RMA
• REST APIs
• Launch Virtual KVM

With the list that I had in my previous post, and noticed that the following that are not in the above list

• Simplified Cisco HyperFlex installation and upgrades
• Roll Based Access Control, Single Sign-On (SAML), Multi-Factor Authentication

E.g. I have to assume that (a) they were either omitted or (b) moved from the free/base tier into Essentials. Because the Cisco documentation does not compare / contract Base with Essentials and Advantage, there is no way to tell which is which. 

[Sandeep Kumar]

Hi Riaan, For Hyperflex, you can refer HyperFlex section in the previously provided link. For RBAC/SSO/MFA, I am assuming you will get them by default in the Base/Free tier as they are part of the core platform.