Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions

Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions

Overview of this book

Cisco Unified Computing System(UCS) provides unique features for the contemporary data centres. Cisco UCS is a unified solution that consolidates computing, network and storage connectivity components along-with centralized management. Cisco UCS reduces TCO and improves scalability and flexibility. Stateless computing blade server's design simplifies the troubleshooting, and Cisco-patented extended memory technology provides higher virtualized servers consolidation results. A hands-on guide to take you through deployment in Cisco UCS. With real-world examples for configuring and deploying Cisco UCS components, this book will prepare you for the practical deployments of Cisco UCS data centre solutions. If you want to learn and enhance your hands-on skills with Cisco UCS solutions, this book is certainly for you. Starting with the description of Cisco UCS equipment options, this hands-on guide then introduces Cisco UCS Emulator which is an excellent resource to practically learn Cisco UCS components' deployment. You will also be introduced to all areas of UCS solutions with practical configuration examples. You will also discover the Cisco UCS Manager, which is the centralized management interface for Cisco UCS. Once you get to know UCS Manager, the book dives deeper into configuring LAN, SAN, identity pools, resource pools, and service profiles for the servers. The book also presents other administration topics including Backup, Restore, user's roles, and high availability cluster configuration. Finally, you will learn about virtualized networking, 3rd party integration tools and testing failure scenarios. You will learn everything you need to know for the rapidly growing Cisco UCS deployments in the real-world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Manual and automatic uplink pinning


Using the end-host mode (NPV), each server is pinned to an uplink port based on Round-robin algorithm. Like Ethernet end-host mode, pin groups can be configured as a static pin group or dynamic pin group. The default configuration is dynamic pin group.

Dynamic pin groups

This is the default pin group setting. In dynamic pinning, the Fabric Interconnect automatically binds server vHBAs to uplink Fabric Interconnect FC/FCoE ports.

Failure response

In case of an uplink failure, server vHBAs are re-pinned to the remaining uplinks of the same Fabric Interconnect. In case of a complete Fabric Interconnect failure, the operating system (Windows, Linux, or hypervisors) relies on its multipath drives (such as MPIO and EMC PowerPath) to re-route I/O for the failed path. If the operating system configuration is missing, Fiber Channel communication will fail until one Fiber Channel uplink is restored on the failed Fabric Interconnect.

This behavior is different from the...