General impressions on UCS?

[rrfield]

So we were "gifted" a UCS C250 M2 server.  Very nice of our Cisco Rep, who has been very good to us.

The server just got RMA'd due to a motherboard issue diagnosed by a remote TAC engineer.

How often does this happen?

During our TAC case, the first engineer did not seem to want to really troubleshoot the problem, rather just said "replace it".  An onsite tech came to swap parts (which we could have done, but whatever).  He was a contractor and had never worked on a UCS server before.  A few issues did arise and he had to call his tech guy at the office, who tried to get a hold of TAC to help out.  This took hours.  When he did get ahold of a TAC, the engineer "helping" us was very distracted, didn't ask any questions, and was very short and snarky.  I had a few followup questions, to which he answered with a link that had very little to do with the problem at hand.  We are still emailing back and forth, albeit very sproatically, trying to get a simple question answered (which was not answered properly because he didn't ask WHAT MODEL OF SERVER WE ARE RUNNING).

We are 0 for 1 on hardware and 0 for 1 on acceptable TAC support.

We are cutting a P.O. to upgrade our ESXi cluster within the next 6  weeks and want to give UCS a fair shake, but obviously our experience  has not been a good one so far.

Is this normal?  If so then we will stick with HP servers.

[Robert Leibold]

Thanks for the suggestion Robert, but I guess I've given up on this server.  Spent enough time trying to get it to work.  It was a freebie anyway, so will probably just get rid of it.  Hope we have better luck with the M2 hardware we just ordered.

Thanks,

Bob

[Lewis Benton]

I've been using the Cisco UCS platform with one chassis and 3 blades (all B230 M1's) for about a year now. 

First off, TAC has been excellent to work with. Except for one issue with B230 performance running vSphere, they've been able to deal with my issues pretty fast.  I've also found my Cisco sales team to be very responsive and helpful in dealing with my constant questions.

The field engineer's that get dispatched though do seem to have little knowledge or experience on the UCS platform.  A lot of them tell me they usually just leave the parts and they aren't familiar with the product.  I've gotten one or two great FE's though.

Personally, I think the software on the UCS has some issues that still need to be addressed.  I've had to do a few power supply swaps on the Fabric Interconnects and there's a known bug (CSCtq80569) that requires you to shuffle them around (you can't do just a straight swap.)  I've had a couple other hardware swaps that have been hindered by software issues.

I think though the solution itself is a great idea.  We evaulated HP, IBM, and Dell, but went with Cisco because the design of the UCS platform made the most sense for our environment. 

I love the fact that I can lose a fabric interconnect (or replace it or upgrade the firmware) without anyone in the company noticing.

I think Cisco will get there once they squash some of the bugs and this will be a great product. I've found Cisco to be very open and responsive to feedback on the platform.

[Robert Burns]

Thanks for the feedback Lewis.  Glad your overall experience has been positive, but we do idenitfy there's room to improve - which we are putting efforts in place to ensure this happens.

Regards,

Robert

[ramora777]

Hello

I manage 40 blades across 5 chassis and 2 data centers. I have never had a single hardware issue in my UCS deployment. I did, on suggestion of Cisco Advanced services, remove and reseat every memory chip on the platform at initial deployment to ward or any shipping issues with memory becoming loose.

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