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Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line

craig — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:05:12 +0000

Cisco had recently added new Fabric Interconnect to their product line up which provide more choice to their client to be consider for their deployment. Previously there were only 6120XP and 6140XP in place for the Fabric interconnect architecture as part of Cisco UCS. The new Fabric Interconnect 6248UP which provide 32 ports FCoE with additional 16 ports expansion module on unified port available which support FCoE, LAN and SAN FC with appropriate module.

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.

Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

craig — Fri, 27 May 2011 05:38:41 +0000

Cisco Unified Computing System had been in the market for more an 18 months now. I am considered 1 of the pioneer members who had sold couple of units to our client locally. It had been proven as 1 of the best blade system with fabric architecture to the client and reliability & quality had able to satisfied the client for more adoption worldwide.

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.

Cisco Transforms Rack Mount Server with UCS integration

craig — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:26:28 +0000

The recent release firmware for Cisco UCS version 1.4 had enabled the support of new blade B230M1 and C series rack mount server integration allow server management from UCS manager. This is a big major changes to the IT market today. Now you will enjoy service profile functionality similar to blade system in Cisco UCS even though if you choose to deploy a rack mount base solution. Not every environment will go with blade system only, therefore Cisco UCS C series rack mount solution integrate with UCS manager is important. It is interesting to monitor the respond from others server vendor such as HP, IBM, DELL, SUN and etc for this major improvement.

Here is the sample screen shot

Cisco offer R series Rack for UCS

craig — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 03:13:07 +0000

This morning when I woke up, I receive an email from my counterpart regarding Cisco UCS R-Series. At first, I I thought it was just another model of blade or rack mount system Cisco had added to their product line. Once I open up the official link and found that is nothing related to the blade or rack mount base UCS machines. Is a RACK!!!! after years of Cisco UCS come into the market, there had been number of users asking why Cisco UCS does not come with their own rack? Finally, I think Cisco has the answer to the customers who had asked the similar question before. Not a bad idea to add the R series as part of the offering, which may looks cool to deploy the full set of UCS & Cisco solutions in Cisco Rack itself now.

Maximize CPU utilization on ESX host with Cisco UCS B250M2

craig — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:01:50 +0000

We were doing some stress test with more than 15 VMs on a single B250M2 Cisco UCS blade machine with 2 x Intel 6 Cores 2.93Ghz, and 192GB memory. While are stress test are pretty simple, each VM been provisioned with 2 vCpu and 4GB of physical memory. We maximize the CPU load of all the virtual machine and end up I was able to capture the print screen as attach here.

Weird Thing had happened here as we maximize the CPU utilization, but the total MHZ on the ESX host had exceeded the calculation if we base on 12 x 2.93 Ghz. I am still trying to understand in details how the system can stretch more than the available capacity on the total Ghz it suppose to have with the chip set on the machine. If you do have any valuable comment to explain this, feel free to comment here as I am interesting to learn this out.

Surprise Finding on ESX Host after SAN switch outage

craig — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:14:28 +0000

I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.

I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here.

SAN Zoning configuration on Cisco UCS

craig — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 08:28:11 +0000

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.

What is NPIV? ( N_Port ID Virtualization or NPIV is a Fibre Channel facility allowing multiple N_Port IDs to share a single physical N_Port)

For more details information, you can refer to the URL HERE

Once the NPIV had been enabled on the SAN Switch, you just need to enable the FC uplink from the Interconnect Fabric by the UCS Manager or CLI mode. Now you should able to see the WWN login from the command prompt, device manager or fabric manager. Any 1 of the method will work. To simplify the setup for the UCS, you can consider port base zoning or WWN zoning. I had done both setup before with VSAN in place, it looks similar to me except from security stand point. If we are only connecting host and storage via the SAN, the port base zoning with the Storage host group features should able to manage the host group to access the correct LUN. If there are additional devices such as tape library, this may create another layer of confusion. At the end, I configured all the zoning base on WWN id, which are still the best configuration in most environment today to prevent any device, host or target conflict in the fabric environment. Not to say the port base zoning will not work, it just the WWN base is more secure and reliable.

I had done the test with the port base zoning and end up, the backup device will be visible even from my ESX server which run on top of Cisco UCS. This is not cool

Screen Shot – VMware vSphere 4 on Latest Cisco UCS

craig — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:55:30 +0000

I manage to capture some screen shot to share over the Cisco UCS platform running with VMware vSphere 4

Summary tab it shows Cisco as the product manufacturer.

Screen shot capture on DV switch which using dual 10G Ethernet uplink.

Screen shot of the summary tab of the B200 M1 blade system in the UCS 5108. You will notice the hardware details and specification in the picture as well.

FCoE VLAN and FC Uplinks in Cisco UCS Architecture

craig — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:18:08 +0000

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.

New Version of Firmware release for Cisco UCS

craig — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:32:04 +0000

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.

For the UCS web URL, you can also directly log in to the IP KVM and launch the specify Physical Server without logging into the UCS admin console. This will allow the users or administrator which do not require full admin access to the UCS Manager, to access the server console with an alternative method. To achieve this, it will recommend the IP KVM managment IP pools should be accessible from the LAN network.

With the new firmware release, I also found that the process to acssociate and disassociate the services profiles had been enhanced. The progress of the task execution are more accurate which can be easily view from the FSM tab for each of the item from the UCS Manager.

I also attached another few pictures that I previously setup for another project in Shanghai.

The rear view of the Cisco UCS which are sitting temporally in the staging room. Each chassis are connected with 4 SFP+ FCoE connections.

Front view of the 2 UCS Chassis.