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

Understanding identity and resource pools


The salient feature of the Cisco UCS platform is stateless computing. In the Cisco UCS platform, none of the computer peripherals consume the hardware's burned-in identities. Rather, all the unique characteristics are extracted from identity and resource pools, which reside on the Fabric Interconnects (FIs) and are managed using UCSM. These resource and identity pools are defined in an XML format, which makes them extremely portable and easily modifiable. UCS computers and peripherals extract these identities from UCSM in the form of a service profile. A service profile has all the server identities, including UUIDs, MACs, WWNNs/WWPNs, firmware versions, BIOS settings, and other server settings. A service profile is associated with the physical server using a customized Linux OS that assigns all the settings in a service profile to the physical server. In case of server failure, if the failed server needs to be removed and the replacement server...