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.

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Front view of the 2 UCS Chassis.

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There are video on the web which show you how to setup the Nexus 1000V in 8 mins video, which is greatly reliable. You can refer to the link here to find out more. Further that, you will no longer require to register and redeem the license as tough as previously does. Once you setup the Nexus 1000V, it will automatically come with the license applied which valid for 60 days, and you can enjoy your sweet time to wait for the final license key and re-apply it. Since the Nexus 1000V come with the http web base, I am not sure why Cisco had not consider to allow us to apply the license key file via the web rather than the messy process of transferring the license file into the nexus 1000v with certain CLI command. To simplify this, will definitely help the administrator to speed up the work.

There are 3 option of installing the VEM, which via VCLI, ESX console or VMware update manager. My setup today are without internet connection, therefore I went for both vcli and SSH protocol and I found that the easiest way are using vCLI. You can download the vCLI from here which is free via VMware official website. A lot of users are not adopting to Nexus 1000V today, but if you ask whether there are a need for it, my answer will be yes. For the users who had been virtualized their environment for years may realized the challenges been faced on the normal vswitch or dvswitch, and Nexus 1000V will greatly address all the challenges we have on the virtual environment.

We also tested the active standby architecture for Nexus 1000V in the VMware environment and it greatly fail over as it promised. Not too much hassle require to configure this, just as simple as 10 mins job follow the video here. Personally I will be glad to see more improvement from Cisco to further enhance and simplify the installation process and configuration which will greatly bring more value to the customer for planning and implementation moving forward.

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To enjoy the benefit of stateless computing, you must ensure that the server or system are boot from SAN. We simulated the blade failure during the demo, and we re-associated the service profile to any of the available blade within the UCS cluster, and power it on. The entire servers are back online which maintain all the necessary system state and no re-configuration was required include LAN, SAN, Hostname and etc. The entire process took less than 20 mins and the system was back online. We simulated few round with different blade but same images and profiles, and it work exactly as it promises. Stateless computing are the key features which meant for the IT administrator to minimize the system down time in the event of hardware failure & system compatibilities.

If you have a hardware failure on the current blade server, which the hardware will be replaced in the next 4 hours,  nothing much could be done on the system administration to resume the production system without stateless computing. With stateless computing in place, you can easily shutdown any of your test & Development systems, and transfer the service profiles to allow the production system back online in less than 20 mins. This will be helpful to improve the SLA and system uptime in the event of hardware failure.

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Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

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You can have a full view about the VCN alliance details from here.

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This picture show how the memory architecture been define in the Cisco memory architecture.

In this picture you can see that it present logically 32 GB which combine 4 x 8GB physical Ram with the Cisco UCS Extended memory technology.
With the expensive 8 GB memory module today, to have a server running with high memory capacity will not able to justify as part of the project business case. But with this technology in place, you will able to scale up to 192 GB per 2 CPU server by using 4 GB memory module. This will significant improve the consolidation ratio of the virtualization project and provide a better ROI for sure.

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• GUI setup following software install
• Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs
• Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services
• iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4
• XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V
• DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses
• Dynamic ARP Inspection for validating ARP requests and responses
• IP Source Guard for filtering traffic on interfaces to valid MAC and IP addresses
• MAC Pinning for assigning Ethernet port members to particular port channel subgroup (where upstream switches do not support port channels)
• Static Pinning

There are more new features in the latest release and please read more from here.

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What is contain in Vblock? It is an end to end package of virtualization include Cisco, EMC and VMware products which simplify the delivery method of the virtualization cloud infrastructure moving forward.

You can read the full details from here

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Each server above will be connected to Nexus 5000 through CNA (Converge Network Adaptor) which provide FCoE and 10GE at the single connection. The Netapp FAS 3140 are connected to Nexus 5000 with FCoE interfaces which provide end to end solution from servers to switches, switches to storage. FC switch are not required to be in placed to allow servers communication to storage in this architecture. You can choose either NFS, FCoE or ISCSI in this configuration. The above picture is for reference and do not meant in very details as I am rush up the drawing about this post. EMC will soon officially launch the storage to support FCoE. I believe this will be the future strategy for Data Center & Storage solution. In Cisco UCS, you will still require FC switch in place as the UCS 6100 interconnect does not meant the full capable FCoE switch as Nexus 5000 did. I think the new architecture are suitable for new and clean deployment and large scale virtualization. It help to reduce the massive cabling, and achieve the throughput requirements needed by the virtualization.

Picture above is Traditional Network and SAN environment VS FCoE for reference purpose

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