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

VSM implementation


The VSM acts as a control plane for the N1KV solution, that is, it is responsible for the vCenter communication, programming, and management of VEMs. Unlike the VEM, which is a code running in the hypervisor, it is actually a VM on an ESXi server. It can also be deployed on a dedicated hardware appliance, such as Nexus 1010. VSMs are typically deployed as high availability (HA) pairs. Have a look at the following diagram for more details:

Please note that we can't have one VSM on hardware appliance Nexus 1110 and the other on the ESXi VSM. Both VSMs should be either on hardware appliance or on ESXi hosts:

  • Control plane controls multiple VEMS
  • Virtual machine running NX-OS