VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘cisco’

Day 1 of the Cisco UCS Bootcamp partner training was mainly an introduction to the hardware, but also established the concept of UCS Server Profiles and Statelessness. Converged Network Fabric and the Cisco’s CNA (Converged Network Adapters) models were covered, and the day ended with a lab exploring the UCSM (Unified Compute System Manager).

I promised to report in the style of the “For Dummies” series. To do that I am going to borrow the common feature “The Part of Tens” always found at the end of those books. The “Tens” are usually a list of concepts suggested for further research. I’m going to use this more as a list of what “sticks” with me from the bootcamp topics. As in the books I hope I motivate VM /ETC readers to research further. If you count My “Tens” it might not even equal 10 items – no promises. I’ll add some opinion and scenario when motivated to do so.

Many others already have provided technical details on the Cisco chassis, blades, modules, adpaters, and the other components, and I’m not about to add anything new to what is already known. In fact, I found myself supplementing what I was being told in class by cross checking various blogs ande other documntation already on the web. Nevertheless, the first “Tens” covers the overview of the UCS parts and concepts.

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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.

On the Virtual Geek Blog, Chad published some early photos of the server infrastructure in use for VMworld 2009.

VMworld – V-Max – powered up and ready to go!

Chad’s post title indicates the VMworld 2009 datacenters are using EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max for storage.

Some links for EMC V-Max
Symmetrix V-Max: A New Paradigm For Storage Virtualization?
Symmetrix V-Max: Storage Architecture Redefined
A great new VMware View/Cisco UCS/V-Max whitepaper
EMC V-Max: V stands for bigger – Storage Soup

On Run-Virtual.com, Richard provides some additional details about the VMworld servers:

At least 512 Cisco UCS blades at VMworld 2009!

“This year there will be 3 ‘datacenters’ at the event where VMware is placing all its kit to support all the hands-on labs, email stations, booths, etc. The biggest datacenter is showing 16 Racks with each 4 Cisco UCS blade chasis, with each 8 blades = 512 Blades! WOW!!”

Some links for Cisco UCS
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
More on Cisco UCS
What are the hardware components of UCS – Ciscowiki
The good and bad of Cisco’s UCS servers

Looks like the bottom of the main escalators at the Moscone Center will be a great spot to get warm if needed!

If you’ve ever had to manually trace the cables from servers to network switches in a rack you probably were not very happy about it. In fact, if you’ve ever had to trace 10 cables from each ESX host to multiple network switches you were most likely aggravated to say the least. The good news is that if you have ESX 3.5 and Cisco switches you can determine the switch ports in use via the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). Even better, the VMware administrator doesn’t even need access to the network switch and can obtain the switch port information directly from the VI Client.
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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. Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the VMworld 2008 EMC Keynote session at 11:00 am today (Weds), but my battery was almost drained so I took manual notes. This post is a translation of those notes.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director and Mr. VMware at EMC, hosted this session titled Designing the Next Generation Data Center. The session was about how storage and networking vendors must work together to build upon the new features available in the new VDC-OS suite of technologies. Specifically, this session zeroed in on the vStorage group of features. Chad explained that EMC, Cisco, and VMware have been working together for a while and he would demo the results of this collaboration for us. Along with Chad onstage was Ed Bugnion, Cisco VP/CTO Virtualization, and Scott Davis, VMware Chief Architect.

Chad began by providing some opinion on how he felt vendors need to evolve their storage products for the next generation data center and the VMware VDC-OS. Some of the points he made were: Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I have to work with a customer’s networking engineers, or even my own Cisco consultants, I get funny looks when I have to tell them that there is not much to the nic teaming configuration on an ESX server.

Once a vSwitch is created it’s just a matter of assigning multiple physical NICs, creating port groups with the assigned VLANs, and setting the right policy. To the disbelief of the network guys, that can be done without adding any driver utilities or third party management software. After that ESX will load balance traffic headed out of the ESX host to the physical switch and provide redundancy for NIC fail over. Up to this point no changes to the switch are even needed.

On the physical switch side it does require more involved set up to provide inbound load balancing and setting up an ether channel. There are many guides already available on how to do this. Here are a few for reference:

ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking – blog.scottlowe.org

VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions