Thank you for the feedback. It is helpful to understand which functionalities are important to you as a customer.
As I noted earlier, while this is now in the Intersight backlog, there are no plans to develop support for adopter BU appliances at this time. Intersight, first and foremost, will manage general purpose UCS servers, and that will continue to be the primary focus throughout this calendar year and moving forward. The volumes of appliances are orders of magnitude less, and therefore they are lower priority. If Intersight isn't successful in managing UCS servers first, then there won't be an Intersight platform to manage Cisco appliances either.
I am adding adopter BU appliances to our Intersight backlog, and I have had some discussions with the Intersight engineering team on what support could look like. There are a large number of additional challenges in managing appliances. For instance, many appliances do not leverage the standard UCS Cisco IMC bundles (either signed differently, or bundled differently), or they only support a sub-set of the Cisco IMC bundles (access to general Cisco IMC bundles would allow customers to upgrade to an unsupported configuration, something we want to avoid). It is obviously possible to overcome these challenges with sufficient time, resources, and continuous, ongoing testing for the life of the products. If you look at this activity across the 30+ appliances offered by Cisco, it is a non-trivial investment. It is and investment that we are considering for the long-term, but it isn't a high enough priority to bump other investments off the priority list in the short-term.
I can also confirm that the Nexus Dashboard Appliances are also considered Cisco appliances, as you mentioned.
Once again, thank you for your wonderful feedback on which use cases are the most relevant to you.
Best regards,
Jacob Van Ewyk
UCS Management Product Manager
