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

Overview of service profiles


A service profile is the principle feature of the UCS platform that enables stateless computing. Service profiles radically improve server provisioning and troubleshooting. Servers can be provisioned in software even before the delivery of physical hardware; in case of hardware failure, it can be replaced by associating the existing software service profile of the failed server without going through any painstaking firmware upgrade procedures.

UCS Manager abstracts a service profile from the configurations available under the following categories:

  • Identity and resource pools: As explained in Chapter 7, Creating Identity Resource Pools, Policies, and Templates, identity and resource pools provide silos for computing node-unique characteristics such as MAC addresses, WWNs, and UUIDs. These identities uniquely recognize systems on the network. UCS servers abstract these physical identities from software pools available from UCS Manager instead of using burned hardware...