Recently there are many confusion about these new terms VN-Link & Cisco nexus 1000V which been widely communicated to the IT user groups. Where were the confusion come from? Most of the time, we are getting confuse about what is VN-Link meant by Cisco. Below is some short description you may want to refer to.
Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V. I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.
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Intel had officially announced the new product series of Intel 6 cores base on 5600 series which will be the successors of Intel Nahelemn 5500 family. The new product series code name Westmere. We will be getting more and more powerful processors in the 2 way servers today which will be good for virtualization and consolidation project. The market are expecting the server vendor like Cisco, DELL, IBM, HP, Fujitsu and etc will launch the server model which support Intel 5600 series very soon. The new Intel 5600 are fully compatible with the existing Intel 5500 sockets from the hardware perspective according to the reliable news. Please view the full story from here.
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Recently I had deployed quite a number of EMC SAN with MDS Switches and Cisco UCS, I found tha FC SAN zoning might be a key consideration we may need to take a look for every deployment. This post will more focus on the MDS and UCS 6120 FC Uplink.
Cisco UCS interconnect fabric switches are utilizing FC uplink to allow the Cisco Unified Computing System to get access to the SAN fabric environment.
Here is the architecture diagram you can refer to. In order to make this work, 1st requirement will be the NPIV.
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Today I found some interesting technical details during my installation of Cisco UCS for the client. FCoE architecture are slightly different when you decide to uplink the FCoE traffic end to end to the Cisco Nexus 5000 unified fabric, or you are doing the FC uplink directly from the UCS 6120 to the MDS or SAN fabric switches. I went through the documentation and my previous round of installation, we were actually configure the LAN & SAN uplink from UCS 6120 to Nexus 5k. Therefore, in our configuration, we required to have specified FCoE VLAN which carry the FCoE traffic to reach the storage through Nexus 5000. Today, I implemented the similar configuration, but the different was the uplink configuration.
This new setup are included with 10 G Ethernet uplink from UCS 6120 to Catalyst 6509 through Fiber, and utilizing FC Uplinks from UCS 6120 to MDS 9124. In my test, I removed the VLAN that I created purposely for FCoE, and found that there are no impact to the configuration. I had confirmed with the support guys that if you are doing an uplink with FC from UCS 6100 to MDS, you will not require to tag the specified VLAN that created for the VSAN in the configuration.
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If you had previously installed, configured or an existing users of Cisco UCS, you may be excited with the latest firmware release from Cisco for the Unified Computing System. I had personally upgraded the firmware and tested with all the functionality, it looks much more better compare to the version 1.0. I will encourage most of you to consider the firmware upgrade which it significant enhance the interfaces and functionality for the Unified Computing System.
The new interface for the KVM also included the button to boot, reset and shutdown the server.
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