Cisco UCS Blades Designed For Virtualization
March 19th, 2009 | 
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Cisco’s announcement of their Unified Computing System (UCS) has definitely been the biggest news this week. Self proclaimed to “unleash the power of virtualization”, the Cisco UCS is an “innovative architecture [that] integrates compute, networking, and virtualization in a single platform.” Although the Cisco UCS looks, feels, and behaves mostly like a chassis full of blade servers on the surface, it is apparently a revolutionary system tailored for virtual infrastructure and cloud services.
I’m late to blog on this topic this week so I’ll provide some quick links and quotes to some of the posts that I found especially helpful and informative from a virtualization perspective. Be sure to follow all the links and read these posts in full.
Click the image to the right for a larger view of the UCS diagram.
Cisco and VMware Enhance Virtualization with Powerful, Scalable Unified Computing System
VMware’s official announcement explains the virtualization features and VMware integration:
Technology features
- Each Cisco Unified Computing System will support thousands of virtual machines to establish a new milestone for computing density.
- Specific areas of development and technical integration for the Unified Computing System architecture include:
- Support for the unified fabric with certification of consolidated I/O via 10Gb lossless Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE);
- Built-in VN-Link, a new technology being jointly proposed to the IEEE, a professional association for the advancement of technology, as one of the industry standards-based approaches for providing granular network visibility at the virtual machine level;
- Integration with the VMware vCenter™ suite of management products for managing virtual network policies and resources;
- Virtualization consulting services from Cisco to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions across their datacenters that reduce costs by provisioning new applications quickly and safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.
Cisco unveils its virtualization-friendly blade platform Unified Computing System
Cisco Enters the Virtual Server Hardware Market
Alessandro Perilli provides some details on the components that make up UCS:
“The only public things right now are the fact the platform can be segmented to simulate up to 320 isolated servers, with thousands of virtual machines, and its components:”
- Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects
- Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis
- Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders
- Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
- Cisco UCS Network Adapters
- Cisco UCS Manager
Stephen Foskett writes about the synergy of UCS and VMware’s vision:
“Cisco will add blade servers to their lineup, that much is true. But these new servers are meant for virtualization only, using VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Suddenly the integration of Cisco’s technology into VMware in the form of the Nexus vSwitch makes much more sense.
They’ll be a solid alternative in the VMware server market, to be sure, but what will the long-term effect be? Certainly, they reveal Cisco’s approach to the new virtual datacenter world, “Data Center 3.0“. Rather than bothering with a soup-to-nuts line of servers, Cisco will focus where the most value is for integrated systems: high-end virtual servers. This fits well into their traditional network-focused strategy, as well as VMware’s vision of data center evolution, vSphere.”
5 Things About the Cisco Announcement and a Wrap Up (Post Prandial)
Greg Ferro writes about the flexibility of UCS architecture:
Folks, this is grade A, number one goodness. Dollars are going leap out of Enterprise pockets to grab hold of this. Lets pretend that server people will actually understand the concepts here (and many will not), but my understanding suggests that I can create hardware architectures that look exactly like my current servers and then drop my current OS/Application software directly on top.
Imagine porting that CiscoWorks server you built three years ago directly onto emulated hardware, on emulated virtual machine, in virtual platorm. It needs no changes and no migration.
Cisco UCS Virtualization-Optimized CNAs
Along with a couple of other UCS posts on his site, Scott Lowe talks about the advantages of the CNA network adapters:
“Today, in the VMware space, virtual machines are connected to a vSwitch because connecting them directly to a physical adapter just isn’t practical. Yes, there is VMDirectPath, but for VMDirectPath to really work it needs more robust hardware support. Otherwise, you lose useful features like VMotion. (Refer back to my VMworld 2008 session notes from TA2644.) So, we have to manage physical switches and virtual switches—that’s two layers of management and two layers of switching. Along comes the Cisco Nexus 1000V. The 1000V helps to centralize management but we still have two layers of switching.
That’s where the “Palo” adapter comes in. Using VMDirectPath “Gen 2? (again, refer to my TA2644 notes) and the various hardware technologies I listed and described above, we now gain the ability to attach VMs directly to the network adapter and eliminate the virtual switching layer entirely. Now we’ve both centralized the management and eliminated an entire layer of switching. And no matter how optimized the code may be, the fact that the hypervisor doesn’t have to handle packets means it has more cycles to do other things. In other words, there’s less hypervisor overhead. I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.”
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