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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I had been busy with the demo on Cisco UCS with VMware and EMC recently. 1 of the key features I had tested was about the Stateless Computing claim by Cisco. As a server or system guys, we all know that the ability to maintain the system state with UUID, Firmware, BIOS, LAN & SAN are important during a hardware changes. Honest speaking, the demo performed last week was my 1st experience on the stateless computing. The outcome was impressive.
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I was tighted up with the cloud computing event we run in KL and Penang last week. It also the 1st time that the Cisco UCS showcase to the public in our event. Of course the demo and staging unit were setup by myself with my close buddy from Cisco Malaysia. The 1st time I unpacked and setup the box, it really surprised myself because it does not require special skillsets to understand too much about the architecture. Of course, I did went for a 4 days boot camp previously for Cisco UCS, but they did not show us step by step to setup and configure the UCS box from scratch. Anyway, to setup the UCS 6120 HA cluster, it take me less than 8 mins from the console CLI. I will suggest anyone of you who are preparing to setup this Cisco UCS, to have the Serial to USB converter ready as most of the business laptop today will not support serial ports. It require console connection to both unit of UCS 6120 for the 1st time to enable the UCS Switching cluster. Once is done, you can access the UCS Manager with the right virtual IP you had enabled in the UCS switch cluster.
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As I am setting up the demo for our event tomorrow, I had actually install 1 of the Cisco UCS blade to run with Windows 7 64 bits. The Windows 7 contains 2 x Intel Xeon R5540 with 48 GB memory. Before we could install the machine with USB key, we need to connect the console cable that come with Cisco UCS package which allow VGA, console and USB ports to be connected to any of the UCS blade.
This picture show the live running Cisco UCS with console connector
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