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

Learning about 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...