The New VIC 1240 come with the following capabilities.

Advanced Support for Virtualized Environments

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 implements the Cisco VM-FEX, which unifies virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure. It provides virtual-machine visibility from the physical network and a consistent network operations model for physical and virtual servers.

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 supports VMware’s VMDirectPath with vMotion technology, which allows it to:

• “Pass through” the hypervisor layer
• Provide near-bare-metal performance for unified computing systems
• Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
• Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
• Near bare-metal I/O performance
• Ease of management
• Exceptional network visibility
• support  Up to 256 dynamic virtual adapters and interfaces

Please read more from the official Cisco UCS site

You can also refer the detail architecture from here

• Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
• Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
• Near bare-metal I/O performance
• Ease of management
• Exceptional network visibility

Related posts:

1. Cisco UCS Product Update with B200M3
2. Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line
3. Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

Today, EMC had launch the VSPEX offering to address the channel market which provide more flexible choice to the partner and users to be considered in smaller scale deployment. vBlock will still be positioned as large scale deployment due to the density of the architecture are design to fit in for different environment.

Below is the high level summary of EMC VSPEX

• VSPEX Is Simple – VSPEX Proven Infrastructures deliver predictable performance that significantly reduces the planning, sizing and configuration burdens of adopting private cloud or end-user computing environments. In addition, EMC’s validation of the VSPEX configuration greatly reduces deployment time. Finally, tight alignment with Windows Server Hyper-V and VMware vSphere cloud infrastructure provide customers a single point of management using System Center for Microsoft cloud and VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite for private cloud deployments.
• VSPEX Is Efficient – Built on EMC’s award-winning VNX™ and VNXe™ unified storage systems and Avamar® and Data Domain® next-generation backup products, VSPEX provides customers with unmatched levels of efficiency. Leveraging technologies such as data deduplication, compression and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), customers can expect to significantly lower operational costs. By integrating these technologies tightly with the hypervisor and end-user computing environments, customers can also benefit from simpler administration and lower management costs.
• VSPEX Is Flexible – VSPEX allows customers to combine their choice of industry-leading server, network, and virtualization technologies into a proven infrastructure validated by EMC and built on a highly flexible EMC storage and backup infrastructure. Additionally, the customer’s channel partner of choice – who understands the specific customer’s requirements – can customize VSPEX to meet their needs.

For details information, you can refer to the official link from EMC

I notice there are couple of significant improvement from this new generation blade as below

1. 2 sockets base blade servers to provide up to 16 cores with Intel E5 chip by utilizing 1600Mhz DDR3 memory
2. It provide up to 384 GB of memory with 16 GB memory module
3. IO interface through put increase up to 40Gbps per blad

I had done the comparison to B230M2, the B200M3 seems to be a better choice for high density computing which require higher memory but considering to reduce the foot print of the machine.

Great release from Cisco which provide more option for us to consider moving forward in the future.

Related posts:

1. Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line
2. Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market
3. Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

Hitachi Data Systems announces the availability of specific integration for VMware’s vCenter called “Hitachi Storage
Manager for VMware vCenter”. Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems jointly developed this functionality in which this will
be installed as a separate plug-in for VMware vCenter. Customers upgrading to vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5.0 using the
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform or Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will
automatically be able to leverage the capabilities of this key integration.

The Hitachi Storage Manager plug-in for vCenter supports both:

• VMware vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1
• VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCenter 5.0

Key features of the plug in include:

• Provisioning of new datastores into the AMS2000 (VSP and USP-V in a future release)
• Capacity utilization for datastores
• Provide a self-service solution that allows customers vSphere administrators to easily manage Hitachi storage through the vCenter Console.
• Enable Joint Customers of VMware and Hitachi Data Systems to provide an end-to-end solution for management of their VMware Infrastructure on Hitachi Storage.
• Close a key integration and competitive gap that other Vendors have existing vCenter integrations.
• Correlation between VMware datastores, ESX hosts, virtual machines and storage resources on the AMS2000, VSP and USP-V systems

Please refer to http://www.hds.com/go/vmware or any local HDS representative for more information about Hitachi Storage Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter.

Related posts:

1. VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1 on SQL 2008 R2
2. Purple screen for ESX host during vSphere 5 Upgrade

With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

One of the key area they highlighted was the stoage protocol they choosed, which is NFS rather than iscsi and FC SAN, which was mainly due to the flexibility of volume shrink or resize that could support on the fly. I am agreed with their statement as personal thought, for large scale deployment, NFS are much easier to manage compare to Iscsi and FC environment.

NFS is pure ethernet ip base, which certified and proven in many of the large scale deployments worldwide. With 10G ethernet today, performance throughput on the NFS will no longer concerns over the performance. If you had not evaluated NFS as an option in your deployment currently, you may want to take a try on it.

Especially on virtual desktop environment, workload offload is a must to be considered move forward to improve the consolidation ratio and maximize the the performance out of the infrastructure build. If you had not considered about this, you should immediately look into this as security can be another major bottlenecks to your infrastructure today, and of courses all the business units are always concern about it.

10Gbps Ethernet no longer as a dream to most enterprise environment. It had become affordable, and realistic to be adopted while users decided to build the virtualization or private enterprise cloud. I had always highlighted that network had become major component of the success for cloud or virtualization, therefore the manageability on the virtual switch had become equally important as well. Previously, Cisco Nexus 1000V is the only choice to perform virtual switch layer management. If you do not want to go for it, you have another choice here. Arista had a similar offer which is vEOS, that allow virtual traffic direct integrate and visible over to the Arista Physical Network switches.

Below are some table comparison within vEOS VS Cisco Nexus 1000V. There are some similarity but will not be the total same approach been taken.

Here is the table shown that some details functionality Compare to Cisco Nexus 1000V.

If you are planning for large scale deployment on 10G environment for production network and IP base storage network, you may also consider Arista as a good fit which they offer low latency and work well with most IP base storage vendor in the market. For more information, please refer to the official link here.

here is the latest Intel Xeon E7 Data sheet. You can view the full copy over here.

Once again, I believe the consolidation ratio will be significant increase in most of the virtualization project in future.

According to the link here www.theregister.co.uk,  it should able to push the total memory up to 1TB per 2 U machine in single chassis. The C260M2 will come with 2 x 10Gb Ethernet and 4 x gigabits NICs, which is very sufficient for most of the deployment today on stand alone or virtualize environment. Cisco claimed it will ship the B230 M2, B440M2 with Intel E-7 base chip set. Once again, I am very excited for this to reach the market as it will transform the server infrastructure and virtualization infrastructure deployment in the future.

You can read more from the original post here.