Product Manager, SAVTG

Joseph Ezerski, CCIE #8588

Cisco UCS Fundamentals

• 20 Years in IT, 8 of them at Cisco

• CCIE #8588 (R&S)

• Product Manager, UCS

• Living and Working from The Netherlands

• Misses the Sunshine

• UCS – The question on everyone’s mind

• UCS versus Legacy Architecture

• UCS Advantage – Stateless Computing

• Extending and Simplifying Management

• Where to find out more

Wait a sec! Cisco sells

SERVERS??

QUESTION #1

• 17,800 unique UCS Customers

• #3 market share in x86 blades (#2 in N. America & US)

• 2,300 UCS channel partners

• 44 ISVs writing to UCS API (and growing)

• Ten of thousands of supported applications

• 70 world record performance benchmarks to date

• Numerous industry awards and certifications

Fastest Growing Product in the Market

So What Is UCS?

QUESTION #1-A

A SINGLE COMPONENT DOES NOT MAKE A SYSTEM UCS

TO UNDERSTAND UCS,

YOU NEED TO SEE THE

WHOLE PICTURE

Email and Internet on a PC

You’ve

Got Mail!

Dedicated MP3 Player

Portable DVD player

Portable Storage

Digital Camera

Phone

You

• All tools in one device

• One User Interface

• Consistent Experience

• Scalable (More Apps)

• Ground Breaking Innovations

• Built for the Cloud

The magic is how Smartphone makers unify

all tools together within a singular device and

manages it all with a single user interface

Every customer,

in every data center,

already has a set of

common technologies:

Servers

Storage

Networking

Management

Definition of Fabric

Computing:

A set of compute, storage,

memory & network

components joined through

a fabric interconnect and the

software to configure

and manage them.

How did we get here?

QUESTION #2

Blade Server Chassis

Chassis Manager $$

Ethernet Modules $$

FC Modules $$

Management Network

Ethernet Network

Storage Area Network

All this stuff costs money and I have to

pay to license and manage it!!

Mgmt Server Mgmt Server Embed management

Unify Fabrics (wire once)

Optimize virtualization –Treat a virtual object like physical object (VNLink)

–Performance and Scale (more vm per server)

Remove unnecessary

–switches

–adapters

–management modules

Less than 1/3rd the support infrastructure for a given workload

Mgmt Server

Mgmt Server • A single system that encompasses:

– Network: Unified fabric

– Compute: Industry standard x86

– Storage: FC, FCoE, iSCSI

– Virtualization optimized

• Unified management model

– Dynamic and rapid resource provisioning (Service Profiles)

• Efficient Scale

– Cisco network scale & services

– Fewer servers with more memory

• Lower cost

– Fewer servers, switches, adapters, cables

– Lower power consumption

– Fewer points of management

UCS Manager Embedded – manages entire UCS

UCS Fabric Interconnect 10GE unified fabric switch

UCS Fabric Extender IO Module

UCS Blade Server Chassis Flexible bay configurations

UCS Blade and Rack Servers

x86 industry standard

Patented extended memory

UCS I/O Adapters Choice of multiple adapters

AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM OPTIMIZES DATA CENTER

EFFICIENCY

Server Health Monitoring

Multi-Chassis Server Identity Manager

Servers 1-8

Servers 17-24

1 Logical Chassis

Servers 9-16

Servers 25-32

Servers 33-40

Servers 49-56

Servers 65-72

Servers 81-88

Servers 97-104

Servers 113-120

Servers 129-136

Servers 145-152 Servers 153-160

Servers 41-48

Servers 57-64

Servers 73-80

Servers 89-96

Servers 105-112

Servers 121-128

Servers 137-144

Ethernet Ethernet

Fiber Channel Fiber Channel

Server Health Monitoring

Multi-chassis Server Identity Manager

Blade & Chassis Management

Fabric Interconnect A Fabric Interconnect B

Legacy Blade Architecture

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 1: Servers 1-16

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 2: Servers 17-32

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 3: Servers 33-48

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 4: Servers 49-64

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 6: Servers 1-16

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 5: Servers 65-80

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 7: Servers 97-112

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 8: Servers 113-138

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 9: Servers 139-154

Enet Switch Enet Switch FC Switch FC Switch

CMC/OA CMC/OA

Enclosure 10: Servers 154-160

Cisco UCS

How can I manage and fully

utilize all this technology

without adding complexity

and doing it quickly?

QUESTION #3

Every house requires a blueprint

detailing how to build it

To build that house we need a series

of inter-working, necessary parts –

from plumbing, electricity, light and

air, waste, and structure

We can think of servers much the

same way….

Simply A Blueprint

Legacy Servers require a lot of manual intervention

NIC MACs

HBA WWNs

Server UUID

VLAN Assignments

VLAN Tagging

FC Fabrics Assignments

FC Boot Parameters

Number of vNICs

Boot order

PXE settings

IPMI Settings

Number of vHBAs

QoS

Call Home

Template Association

Org & Sub Org Assoc.

Server Pool Association

Statistic Thresholds

BIOS scrub actions

Disk scrub actions

BIOS firmware

Adapter firmware

BMC firmware

RAID settings

Advanced NIC settings

Serial over LAN settings

BIOS Settings

SAN

LAN

Server Identity &

Personality

Service

Profile1

Service

Profile2

Service

Profile3

Service

Profile x

UCS Rack and

Blade Servers

UCS Service Profiles reduce complexity and speed up deployment

NIC MACs

HBA WWNs

Server UUID

VLAN Assignments

VLAN Tagging

FC Fabrics Assignments

FC Boot Parameters

Number of vNICs

Boot order

PXE settings

IPMI Settings

Number of vHBAs

QoS

Call Home

Template Association

Org & Sub Org Assoc.

Server Pool Association

Statistic Thresholds

BIOS scrub actions

Disk scrub actions

BIOS firmware

Adapter firmware

BMC firmware

RAID settings

Advanced NIC settings

Serial over LAN settings

BIOS Settings

Server Identity &

Personality To build our server

… Make one or more unique

profile copies from a template (i.e. our

blueprint)

Associate a single profile to a single server.

Repeat for more servers as needed

Rapidly deploy any number of servers in just

a few clicks!

• Extremely Rapid Deployment

• Rapid Recovery In Event of Failure

• Easy Migration Path to Upgrade of Servers to new HW

• Repurpose Blades as needed

• Disaster Recovery

• Works with both Rack and Blade

• Other ideas?

Service

Profile

Service

Profile

Service

Profile

• Fewer manual steps – Adjust BIOS, Firmware, NIC & SAN Settings: 120 parameters in all, a “server personality”

– Edit storage controller settings

• Decreased chances of human error

– Firmware updates become automatic with the update of the master service profile

• Easier repeatability and faster server provisioning – Higher RAS

– Lower software costs

• Enforce greater consistency

• Simplified cloning and copying

• Move service profiles from rack to blade and blade to rack

• Group, undo and single-operation firmware updates

What about managing the

rest of my data center?

QUESTION #4

UCSM Takes Care of All Infrastructure in

the UCS Domain

– Discovery, Inventory, Monitoring, Diagnostics,

Statistics Collection, Configuration of Network,

Blades, Storage Connections, Firmware, etc

Speaks GUI, CLI, SNMP, IPMI, SMASH-

CLP

AND / OR

UCS Manager

GUI

CLI

Packaged Systems

Management Software

User Developed Portal,

Tools, Utilities

OPEN XML APIs for integration with

new and existing data center

infrastructure

Manage UCS with Industry Standard Tools

Service Orchestration

Provisioning and Configuration

Monitoring and Analysis

Third Party Management

Unified Control API

Service Profiles

Cisco UCS Pools

Cisco UCS Manager

Unified Management at Scale

UCS Manager UCS Manager

Data Center 1

UCS Manager UCS Manager

Data Center 2

UCS Manager

Data Center 3

• Unifies management of multi UCS domains

• Simplify global operations with centralized

inventory, faults, logs and server consoles

• Delivers global policies, service profiles, ID

pools and templates

• Foundation for high availability, disaster

recovery and workload mobility

• Model based API for large scale automation

UCS Central

• Turn-Key Solution; ready for use in hours

• A single, integrated, out-of-the-box solution

• Enforce Best Practices with Consistent Infrastructure Policies

• Seamless virtual and physical resource pooling

• Hypervisor agnostic

• End-to-End Automation

• Model-based automation - no need for scripting

• Single-click policy-driven provisioning

• Ongoing lifecycle management

Self Service Infrastructure Provisioning

OK, you have my

attention. Where can I go

to find out more?

QUESTION #5

• Data Sheets

• Validated Designs

• White Papers

• Quick Start Guides

• Bundles & Promos

Or you can ask your local DC Team for a demonstration

www.cisco.com/go/ucs

• Data Sheets

• Validated Designs

• White Papers

• Best Practices

• Quick Start Guides

• Bundles & Promos

Or you can ask your local DC Team for a demonstration

• UCS is a truly innovative way of bringing together infrastructure we

all have in the data center, but we understand that infrastructure is

only the foundation. The real value is in applications and solutions.

• Sign up for my other session on UCS and Applications. A brief talk

on how UCS can act as the foundation upon which your applications

can run better than ever.

• Today 14:15-15:15 in Session Room #2

…AND THANK YOU

QUESTIONS?