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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I had been busy with the demo on Cisco UCS with VMware and EMC recently. 1 of the key features I had tested was about the Stateless Computing claim by Cisco. As a server or system guys, we all know that the ability to maintain the system state with UUID, Firmware, BIOS, LAN & SAN are important during a hardware changes. Honest speaking, the demo performed last week was my 1st experience on the stateless computing. The outcome was impressive.
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I was tighted up with the cloud computing event we run in KL and Penang last week. It also the 1st time that the Cisco UCS showcase to the public in our event. Of course the demo and staging unit were setup by myself with my close buddy from Cisco Malaysia. The 1st time I unpacked and setup the box, it really surprised myself because it does not require special skillsets to understand too much about the architecture. Of course, I did went for a 4 days boot camp previously for Cisco UCS, but they did not show us step by step to setup and configure the UCS box from scratch. Anyway, to setup the UCS 6120 HA cluster, it take me less than 8 mins from the console CLI. I will suggest anyone of you who are preparing to setup this Cisco UCS, to have the Serial to USB converter ready as most of the business laptop today will not support serial ports. It require console connection to both unit of UCS 6120 for the 1st time to enable the UCS Switching cluster. Once is done, you can access the UCS Manager with the right virtual IP you had enabled in the UCS switch cluster.
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As I am setting up the demo for our event tomorrow, I had actually install 1 of the Cisco UCS blade to run with Windows 7 64 bits. The Windows 7 contains 2 x Intel Xeon R5540 with 48 GB memory. Before we could install the machine with USB key, we need to connect the console cable that come with Cisco UCS package which allow VGA, console and USB ports to be connected to any of the UCS blade.
This picture show the live running Cisco UCS with console connector
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I am current setup the Cisco UCS in my office for the coming event on this Wednesday and Friday, I managed to do some screen shots to share with you all about the outlook of Cisco UCS Manager and integrated Virtual KVM.
Here is the 1st screen shots for Cisco UCS Manager which show the physical chassis configuration from single console. The chassis outlook showing the exact picture of how the blade had been inserted to the chassis. It provide all the hardware inventory for each single blade in multiple chassis from the UCS Manager.
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