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

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

While introduce new Fabric Interconnect, the IO Module for UCS Blade Chassis had been further enhance with 2208XP which provide 80Gbps throughput per IO module, and allowed up to 160Gbps per chassis. This option will allow users to provide higher throughput to the blade infrastructure which require more than 80Gbps per chassis.

In the official document from Cisco, the 6248UP is ready with Layer 3 capability which will require additional L3 daughter card to be added in to enable the Layer 3 function from the switch. This is similar to the current Nexus 5548 and 5596 which is offering in the market today with L3 capable. The daughter card are currently not available which will only release in future. This is a good move for Cisco as we had feedback many times about the L3 capability in Fabric Interconnect could benefits to many deployment we have today.

I am absolutely excited with the announcement been made on the new line up for Cisco UCS.

For details information, please refer to the official link from Cisco here.

Related posts:

1. Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

After few nights of troubleshooting, I was running out of clue. Came to the sudden, I accidentally search the computer name in AD under the category of Users object group, and I found an user account been created in AD with the same name as we define on the cluster name. I was wondering whether this could caused the confuse to the system. Therefore, I was suggesting to remove the user name temporally as it was not use at the moment and tried to reform the cluster. Guess what, the cluster form up as it needed to be in less than 1 minutes. We were so happy to end the marathon troubleshooting every night well and we were also very pissed off with the bugs we face here.

I am not very sure what is the real reason behind can really cause this, but this is the real case which take us few days to figure out. I think Microsoft should seriously look into this problem as it sound stupid to have this bugs in place today. User name and computer object name are always not the same thing in AD, how can the system confuse with it?If this is unavoidable, they should put in to the documentation or check list to remind the users on this. My personal comment on Windows 2008 Cluster technology, it does not make the administrator life simple, and it added too much dependency for the Microsoft AD. Please take note that this problem happen to both windows 2008 and windows 2008 R2.

Beside that, strongly urge all the users to look in to the application tier as well, which there are some applications may not support ip-hashing which could end up confuse the switches and create looping. Most Servers require NIC teaming just for HA but not aggregation through put, if that the case, choose wisely what you need rather than what is good to have to prevent unnecessary down time to the infrastructure.

Recently there are public announcement that Cisco UCS is rank #3 in worldwide blade server market. This is really great news for Cisco Team who had put in a lot of efforts and partner who are involve to make this success. Of course the client who had adopted to Cisco UCS should be impress and happy with the value that UCS had brought on which transform the traditional open system computing technology for the day to day operation as well.

If you had not tested or tried the Cisco UCS before, I will strongly urge you to keep an eye open and give it a try on that.

The question posted by my buddy was;  how we could move or migrate the same state of the virtual machine to a physical or virtual without impact to the production environment?  My answer to him was big NO as this is Domain controller and not a normal application or database server migration.

We went through some due diligence and found that certain machines had been pointing to this DC for the DNS server preference IP. In this case, we may need to ensure Preferred DNS server IP on the client are require to change.

I would like to talk a little bits of the possibility we usually considered while come to p2v migration or v2v migration about the Domain controller.

As you may know, p2v a domain controller is strongly not recommended. I will usually setup a new DC on the VMware farm that I had, and perform the reconfiguration and role transfer as usual on the Domain controller level for the ease of migration. This mainly just follow the best practices from Microsoft for replacing a DC in the environment.

There may be some cases while users insist to maintain the same host name and IP of the DC, which you really want to perform a conversion from p2v or v2v, I will suggest to try on cold clone method. Which in this case, you will require to power down the domain controller.

Again, no right or wrong, on which method you prefer to do, but just be cautious as reminder that migrating a DC are not same as common application server as we do.

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.

I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4

Unified Computing Blog

M. Sean McGee

The only thing you could do is to wait until both HP and VMware to come out a final fix in this case. Quick solution, is change hardware vendor or different platform. I had experienced 3 times about it, in the past 2 months and this is the latest finding we had received from both VMware and HP regards the latest PSOD we had. HP had recommended to upgrade the BIOS, Firmware and driver for multiple times, but this doesn’t fix the issue we are facing. Lately there had release another new update bios and hope this problem will be gone after this.

Feel free to share any work around solution beside the official link provided by tech support.