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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Today I was setting up the Nexus 1000V with Cisco UCS, and this was my 2nd time of experiencing the nexus 1000V. Previous experience when I did the 1st installation and configuration on Nexus 1000V, it take me few days to get it done, but it only took us 1 few hours to do so with a help from my colleague who are the networking expert. I was using the Nexus 1000V version 1.2 which is greatly enhance and simplify VS the version 1.
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Just found this from Duncan’s blog today and I think is important to share with every VMware administrator. The security hardening reference guides are available from VMware now. You can read the full details from here. I will suggest all the VMware administrator to read this and consider to implement the necessary configuration to secure the virtual infrastructure. These documents are not final yet and still in draft version but I do find it is helpful for everyone to understand and consider about the security hardening from every aspect.
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Previously Oracle had decline to provide the official support if you virtualizing your database instance into the VMware virtual infrastructure. Today, there is an official announcement from VMware which confirm the official support from oracle will be provided even you virtualize your database server into VMware.
This is a good news for most of the ERP users especially when you have SAP running in your production environment.
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