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 storage connectivity options


Storage access is a crucial configuration for UCS solutions providing raw storage for both virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Most UCS deployments run virtualized environments where virtual workloads leverage many advanced features of centralized storage accessible through FC, FCoE, and iSCSI protocols. Most UCS blade servers provide very limited direct-attached internal storage space sufficient for installing hypervisors locally and leveraging centralized storage for all virtual servers.

Raw storage is available in three different categories. We will now briefly introduce these main raw storage categories:

  • Direct Attached Storage (DAS): This is the storage available inside a server and is directly connected to the system through the motherboard. The cost and performance of this storage depends upon the disks and RAID controller cards inside the servers. DAS is less expensive and is simple to configure; however, it lacks the scalability, performance...