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

Storage connectivity design considerations


UCS storage physical connectivity has a slightly different design consideration as compared to LAN physical connectivity.

The following are some design considerations for SAN connectivity:

  • Northbound storage physical connectivity does not support vPCs like LAN connectivity, where you can have cross-connected vPCs for redundancy.
  • Depending on the storage type, port channeling or trunking is possible to combine multiple storage uplink ports that provide physical link redundancy.
  • Redundancy of storage resources is handled by the storage itself and varies from vendor to vendor including active-active, active-passive, Asymmetric Logical Unit Assignment (ALUA), and vendor specific implantations such as EMC PowerPath.
  • Storage can be connected through northbound Cisco Nexus, MDS or third-party fabric switches. This is the recommended configuration for better scalability and performance.
  • It is possible to connect storage directly to UCS Fabric Interconnects, which...