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 Fabric Interconnect switching modes


UCS Fabric Interconnect supports two types of switching modes: end-host mode (EHM) and the standard Ethernet switching mode. The default switching mode is the EHM, which eliminates the use of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) on Fabric Interconnect. The standard Ethernet switching is rarely used and it is recommended that you do not implement this option unless there is a use case.

Note

Switching mode conversion is a disruptive change requiring a Fabric Interconnect reboot and hence should be planned during a scheduled maintenance window.

Ethernet end-host mode

The end-host mode is the default mode of operation for UCS Fabric Interconnect Ethernet connectivity. In this mode, UCS Fabric Interconnect is presented to the northbound LAN switch as an end host with many adapters. STP is not configured on the uplink switch ports. Since there is no STP, all FI ports are in the forwarding state irrespective of the northbound topology. This means that data...