Unified Compute: Cisco UCS Sales Specalty Training notes

Data Center Components

B230 M1

* Stateless Computing – Server Profile – MAC, WWN, IP, Firmware, BIOS, VLAN, ACL etc

Service Profile – Personality – MACS, WWN, UUIDs

Service Profile – Server Resources – vNIC and VHBAs

Service Profile – Behavior – Qos, Firmware etc – abstract hardware

Nexus 2K – Fabric Extender to support 1G Connection for FCOE

Nexus 2K & 5K acts single virtual Switch

CNA – Convergency Network Adpater ?

Nessus7K – HA, Support VDC up to 4 par

UCS VIC M81KR with FI ?

Remove software virtual switch, Replace software based switching on esx with asic based on FI, VN-Link, VIC can be both hw or virtual but CNA only work with Nessus 1000v

UCS P81E Virtual Interface with UCS Server

Support up to 128 PCIe vNIC, dynamic provisioning of vNIC and vHBA, VN-Link

Standard Mode: 1-1 VMC –> PCIe by VIC. All traffic sent to upstream FI for switching

High Performance Mode: by passing VM IO. Direct connect VIC, eliminate a complete memory copy in hypervisor. Performance Gain 50% more

VN-LINK – Move Data Link to VM layer

Issues addressed by Cisco UCS

UCS Management

Front Panel : Video USB Serial

Ethernet Connects Cisco Integrated Controller CIMC runs on Baseboard Management Controller BMC

Inband -

Outband – IPMI2, CLI, Web interface

LOM : Lan on Motherboard

N+1 vs Grid Redundancy : twice the non-redundancy-survive the loss of an entire power grid within dc

Inbound and Outbound: inbound not redudant, Outbound redudant N+1

UCS Fabric Interconnect / Fabric Switches

not for non-UCS hardware, cannot upgrade to Nexus 5000

Fabric Extender

IO MUX – flexible bandwidth alloc between blade and fabric switch, transparent to user, managed by CAM.

Chase Management Controller CMC – service processor, HA with another fabric extender/CMC, discover hw

Storage Management

Top of Rack, End of Row or Middle of Row

Summary of Top of Rack advantages (Pro’s):

Copper stays “In Rack”. No large copper cabling infrastructure required.
Lower cabling costs. Less infrastructure dedicated to cabling and patching. Cleaner cable management.
Modular and flexible “per rack” architecture. Easy “per rack” upgrades/changes.
Future proofed fiber infrastructure, sustaining transitions to 40G and 100G.
Short copper cabling to servers allows for low power, low cost 1oGE (10GBASE-CX1), 40G in the future.
Ready for Unified Fabric today.

Summary of Top of Rack disadvantages (Con’s):

More switches to manage. More ports required in the aggregation.
Potential scalability concerns (STP Logical ports, aggregation switch density).
More Layer 2 server-to-server traffic in the aggregation.
Racks connected at Layer 2. More STP instances to manage.
Unique control plane per 48-ports (per switch), higher skill set needed for switch replacement.