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 VSANs


A VSAN is a Cisco proprietary security mechanism, which can be compared to VLANs for the networks. VSANs can further increase security for storage and servers by allowing only the physical member ports of storage and servers to physically access each other. As with VLANs, if a port on the same fabric switch is not part of a VSAN, it will not have access to SAN.

There are number of ways that SAN could be connected with UCS servers, which include the following:

  • Cisco FC MDS switches: MDS switches are Cisco FC SAN connectivity switches. These switches deal with the SAN protocols and are recommended in large-scale environments requiring a dedicated SAN infrastructure.
  • FC module expansion or unified ports in Cisco Nexus switches: Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches provide FC module expansion to provide FC ports with SAN connectivity. The newer 5500/5600 series switches have unified ports like the Fabric Interconnects, which can be configured as Ethernet, FC, or FCoE. These switches...