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.
Read more »
Unified had become a key word today, and what does it really meant for everyone? It is similar as the phenomenal Cloud Computing 2 years ago. We had seen the storage vendor are moving from FC SAN, ISCSI SAN, NAS to a unified storage today. What a unified storage does today are providing all the storage protocol standard in the market in a single box. Vendor such as EMC and Netapp had their Unified storage to support this today and proven to be performing and user are happy with it.
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
FCoE will be the next trend for most users to be adopted. Previous post I had explain about the high level architecture from Cisco UCS. Here I will describe the FCoE end to end solution which is slightly different with the UCS architecture. Please note that both architecture is similar but it does not same to each others.
Read more »
As the picture show above, it is the high level architecture which requires to run the entire UCS solution from Cisco. Not necessary every environment will require Nexus 7000, it is meant for large scale networking environment. You may go with various different switches to replace the Nexus 7000 in the picture depend on your requirement. In the current UCS release, the UCS 6100 interconnect fabric will integrate with the MDS 9000 series Fiber Channel environment or others compatible FC switches. This allow UCS blade I/O to be consolidated with CNA with 10Gbps per connection as FCoE. This had significant reduce the physical cabling requirement per blade chassis.
Read more »
