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

Learning about VSAN


VSAN is a Cisco proprietary security mechanism which can be compared to VLANs for the networks. VSAN can further increase security for storage and servers by allowing only the physical member ports of storage and servers to physically access each other. Like VLANs, if a port on the same Fabric switch is not part of a VSAN, it will not have access to SAN. There are a number of ways that SAN could be connected with UCS servers which include the following:

  • Cisco Fiber Channel MDS switches: MDS switches are Cisco Fiber Channel SAN connectivity switches. These switches deal with the SAN protocols and are recommended in large-scale environments requiring a dedicated SAN infrastructure.

  • FC module expansion or Unified ports in Cisco Nexus switches: Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches provide FC module expansion to provide FC ports with SAN connectivity. The newer 5500 series switches have unified ports like the Fabric Interconnects which can be configured as Ethernet, FC, or FCoE...