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

Overview of FC and iSCSI storage


Both FC and iSCSI are used to encapsulate SCSI protocol commands for storage. We will briefly discuss SCSI first.

Overview of SCSI

SCSI (pronounced as scuzzy) is an industry standard protocol for attaching various I/O peripherals such as printers, scanners, tape drives, and storage devices. The most common SCSI devices are disks and tape libraries.

SCSI has evolved from parallel, daisy-chained SCSI to serially attached SCSI (SAS). Older parallel SCSI specifications are defined as Ultra-1, Ultra-2, Ultra-3, Ultra-320, and Ultra-640, whereas the new SAS specifications are defined as SAS 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. These specifications differ in speed and other performance enhancements. SCSI hard disks are superior in terms of performance and reliability as compared with ATA (PATA and SATA) drives. SCSI drives are commonly used in enterprise-grade SANs because of their reliability and speed.

In the SAN world, SCSI is the core protocol to connect raw hard disk storage with...