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

Nexus and vPath


Cisco vPath allows you to deploy network services like in a physical switch. It is embedded in every VEM. Essentially, it provides intelligent packet steering which means that policy lookup is decoupled from enforcement. For example, with the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), which is a virtualized Cisco firewall, once a policy decision is made at the VSG for a particular flow, it's up to vPath now to implement that policy for each packet in that flow; thereby freeing up the VSG.

The vPath is enabled at a port-profile level. When VSG policies are configured, flow is evaluated against the policy by the VSG, and then the policy decision is pushed for implementation to vPath. It stores that decision only for the duration of that flow. Once there is a Reset (RST) event or Finish (FIN) flag, the flow entry is removed from the vPath table. There is also an activity timer which can terminate sessions.

FIN and RST are TCP control bits (flags). FIN indicates that the client will send...