Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions - Second Edition

By : Anuj Modi, Prasenjit Sarkar
Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions - Second Edition

By: Anuj Modi, Prasenjit Sarkar

Overview of this book

Cisco Unified Computer System (UCS) is a powerful solution for modern data centers and is responsible for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. This hands-on guide will take you through deployment in Cisco UCS. Using real-world examples of configuring and deploying Cisco UCS components, we’ll prepare you for the practical deployments of Cisco UCS data center solutions. If you want to develop and enhance your hands-on skills with Cisco UCS solutions, this book is certainly for you. We start by showing you the Cisco UCS equipment options then introduce Cisco UCS Emulator so you can learn and practice deploying Cisco UCS components. We’ll also introduce you to all the areas of UCS solutions through practical configuration examples. Moving on, you’ll explore the Cisco UCS Manager, which is the centralized management interface for Cisco UCS. Once you get to know UCS Manager, you’ll dive deeper into configuring LAN, SAN, identity pools, resource pools, and service profiles for the servers. You’ll also get hands-on with administration topics including backup, restore, user’s roles, and high availability cluster configuration. Finally, you will learn about virtualized networking, third-party integration tools, and testing failure scenarios. By the end of this book, you’ll know everything you need to know to rapidly grow Cisco UCS deployments in the real world.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Cabling - Fabric Interconnects and Fabric Extenders


UCS is a network-and-computer integrated solution. All management and data movement intelligence for chassis components and blade servers is present in the Fabric Interconnects and Fabric Extenders (which are line cards for the FIs, also called I/O modules, or IOMs). Therefore, proper cabling between Fabric Interconnects and I/O modules is an important design consideration.

Fabric Extenders - Fabric Interconnect cabling topology

Fabric Extenders are used to connect blade server chassis to Fabric Interconnects. The I/O modules act as line cards to the Fabric Interconnects. It is therefore necessary to maintain proper connectivity between IOMs and Fabric Interconnects. Since an IOM becomes part of the Fabric Interconnect, multiple links from a single IOM can only be connected to a single Fabric Interconnect and cannot be connected across to the other Fabric Interconnect. Depending on the IOM model, there can be 1, 2, 4, or 8 links from the...