[cisco-voip] Cisco UCS vs Spec's based solution - evaluation

[Pawlowski, Adam]

We did spend a bit of time looking into this, and ended up going with third party spec-based for VMWare. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that we, as the voice group, maintain the software and application configuration, but do not play with the hardware. Regarding the MCS servers, we basically spent our time and effort upgrading disk drives or adding RAM, but we did not have the VMWare experience internally - it's just something that's handled by another group.

They felt comfortable operating VMWare with 3rd party (HP) blade servers, which really doesn't matter to us. The application works, and we don't have to worry about the backend. Deciphering the support matrices regarding feature support in the various versions of ESXi was a bit more challenging, as well as confirming to them that we are not oversubscribing or sharing hardware resources. Basically, we moved all the little boxes to one big box, but we didn't gain many of the advantages they are used to with regard to server virtualization. 

At the time I heard from peers at other businesses that UCS was being pushed, so if your refresh cycles had you moving to Flexpod or UCS deployments for other reasons, then you'd probably want to go with that hardware. If you are willing to support the hardware yourself, noting  explicitly Cisco's stated limitations regarding where they draw the line for support, then third party may be what you want to do. Usually it seems like we opt to rely on vendor support as much as possible, so we do not end up trying to herd them all together, or get stuck in a situation where we are holding the bag, but, at this time we've not done so and it has not been a problem.

This document clears that up a bit:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/ps6884/products_tech_note09186a0080bf23f5.shtml