VM /ETC

Like Scott Lowe earlier in the year, I am in Silicon Valley this week attending Cisco’s UCS Bootcamp training for partners. This post starts a series I will publish as I learn about the Unified Compute System (UCS). Instead of focusing on the technical details of the UCS blade chassis, servers, and it’s various components I plan to maintain a solution oriented, comparison focus in my reports. That is, my intent this week is to answer some questions that many VMware admins have (based on my own conversations) about what makes Cisco UCS a solution to be considered. Put simply – Most administrators understand the benefits of consolidating data center hardware with blades, but why is Cisco’s solution unique?

Some questions I hope to answer:

• Why would an IT shop benefit from deploying UCS blades over other established blade chassis and server hardware solutions already available today?
• What’s the big deal with FCoE and why would I want to use it over iSCSI or NFS?
• Does Cisco really want to sell IT Departments all the hardware in the datacenter?
• What administrative, configuration, and logistical changes does UCS create for VI administrators, and is UCS the best choice for VMware?

I plan to relay what I discover this week in the way that the popular instruction series “For Dummies” tackles technical subjects. VM /ETC readers should understand a major difference from the book series: the guy writing these posts is actually one of the “dummies” too.

I’m also going to point out that I have no hands on experience with UCS and Cisco Blades yet, and for the most part I am reporting in good faith about the material presented to me by Cisco and from the experience of the hands on labs I perform. I will attempt to link to others like Scott that have been able to set up this hardware and have blogged about the technical details.

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