Your point of UUID’s is a great one, PAN does migrate the UUID’s. All this data is stored in an XML configuration which can be zipped up and migrated to another site for disaster recovery purposes.

This allows you to have your DR site not just sitting there doing nothing it could be used for Dev/Test and your production sites physical and virtual servers (which could be on a mixture of Xen, VMware, Hyper-V, etc) can all be moved across using the “stateless” blade approach.

Obviously this depends on your production data being replicated to the DR facility, but the savings can be huge in terms of physical hardware cost, software licenses, etc. The best thing with this approach is you use the same DR process for physical and/or virtual servers. This is all thanks to stateless blades.

I love the site BTW its a great resource for information!

Regards

Martin.

Sorry for my mistake, I double confirm with my counterpart again, the fail-over option is not automated as the last test we done is base on pooling option as suggested in the post, which I thought it was automated.

For the software license issue, my personal experience on ERP which will require license to be regenerated while we migrate the state of the machine to a different hardware, mainly due to the UUID change. If PAN can retain the hardware identity as similar to service profiles, then this should be fine.

In UCS its not an automated process its manual, you can deploy a perl script but it has limitations on what it can actually do see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2063174 Cisco state “this feature of full blown blade/SP failover has not made it in the list of upcoming features.” and then go onto say “I will not go so far as to say it will be never, but its not in the immediate timeframe.” this was dated Jan 2012. So you’ll need to use the same old method of buying extra hardware and using clustering software to provide highly available applications, and not taking the full advantages of what stateless computing resources can truly have to offer.

for more details about what PAN does see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6xSI6kBfX0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWau0r7jxHA since the “state” is all in software and pushed out to a blade as and when its deployed I don’t see how a Software vendor will detect the changes and retire the existing activated license key? we’ve been using this approach for the last several years and never ran into a situation where licenses have been an issue. Even when we go from a blade with 4 cores to 8 cores for example.

Cheers

Martin.