Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) vs. SUSE Harvester

Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.

Incentivized

It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• Cisco HyperFlex supports end-to-end intelligent automation
• Documentation of the deployment process is simple and easy to understand for new users.
• Will be able to automate the deployment process
• Will be able to provide the support to business faster as it is based on the "Hyperconverged Infrastructure" principle

Incentivized

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• Too much integration with Cisco UCS fabric interconnects is required, which makes the product most useful for customers who already have Cisco UCS. Options without fabric interconnects are limited.
• Hyper-V integration is way behind (but to be fair I think that's true for most vendors in this space).

Incentivized

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

We are doing it in the current moment. The platform expansion will be twofold.

Incentivized

Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.

Incentivized

I never contacted Cisco support for any problem. I cannot skip this question. It provides good hardware for my organization to using this product. All the updates will be made promptly. Anything happen we just need to open a ticket to the helpdesk team. We can get new info from a team in Malaysia.

Incentivized

Fast, powerful, flexible.

Incentivized

VMware vSAN is more elastic and easy to sell as you can have more flexibility with the hardware and can use or just upgrade hardware already deployment in the client infrastructure and additionally its have no dependencies about the DNS/NTP, what is important..

Incentivized

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

• HX made positive impact on our overall business objective and helped in reducing operational and capital expenditures almost by 60%
• We used to have huge footprint of FC SAN storage and highly skilled SME's to manage the FC SAN environments. HX helped in getting rid of costly SAN investments and we could move the skilled SMEs on higher work stack. With HX, we are able to effectively manage day to day operations with less skilled resources.
• We also benefitted largely from the single OEM support (Cisco end to end for HX, network fabric and hypervisor). In earlier case, we used to log service requests to SAN vendor, Hypervisor vendor and network fabric vendor separately. In case of inter-related issues between the vendors, our business used to suffer. These all challenges are removed by HX adoption. This is helping us support the business with maximum uptime ever. Our service SLA's are also improved by 70%

Incentivized

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it