The Network Knows

  The Network Knows   “It is your data center. Do you know what’s happening inside it? Is it even possible to know? You need to know what’s going on, but how can you? You can’t map it, you can’t monitor everything. All these pieces are talking to each other and interaction in ways you …

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Amsterdam Demonstration Lab (Cisco / Panduit)

Lets go down a layer in the data center. All the way down to the physical layer, perhaps even the facility foundation some might say. As infrastructure folks we always talk about things like networking, compute, virtualisation, storage, and more and more about applications. But those don’t work very well without a good environment for …

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Protected: The baby UCS

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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Adding a UCS Rack Server

“When are you going to create a new video?” That is a question I quite regularly receive from people that use the original “Adding a new UCS chassis” video. For a while now the idea was to show how you could add a UCS C-series (rack server) to a running UCS system. The challenge had …

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The Network KnowsAmsterdam Demonstration Lab (Cisco / Panduit)Protected: The baby UCSAdding a UCS Rack Server

May 29 2011

Bronze – and it feels like Gold

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Compute

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Less then two years ago Cisco announced it’s blade server solution, the Cisco Unified Computing System. At the end of Q1 CY11 it has been a mere 21 month since shipments started

Time flies – countless customers meetings, finding new partners that are considered leaders in this for Cisco new market, training existing Cisco partners on UCS, and perhaps you have seen us at one of the many events, seminars, trade-shows that we participated in.

And then it was May 25th, 2011. Bronze that feels like Gold.

Time stopped (for just brief moment – because we need to get to Silver). For the first since introducing Cisco UCS, it has been included in the IDC Worldwide Server Market Share tracker for Q1 CY11. Here are the results:

Entering the charts at #3 globally and a stunning #2 in the USA. That is a fantastic result. With over 5400 customers and $900M annualized run-rate revenue UCS is on fire. If you are from The Netherlands, it is customers like Previder and Parentix that have made this happen. If you not Dutch, this customer list might be of interest to you.

To all of our customers and partners: Thank You!!

If I were allowed to give an acceptance speech it would probably sound a bit like “… bla bla bla …. I would like to thank my parents …. bla bla bla ….. and dedicated this 3rd place to all of our customers that believe in UCS.”.

Take a moment to read the Cisco corporate blog” Cisco Servers? They said UCS would never succeed…

Time has stopped long enough now – Bronze really felt like Gold this time around. We have now set our sights on Silver.

Regards

TJ

 

Just for Fun – the competition has been spreading FUD around, spend 2 minutes watching: “Worst Predictions Ever”

 

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Apr 23 2011

Adding an extra UCS Chassis – the configuration minutes

Categories:

Compute

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There has been a lot of really positive feedback on the original “adding an extra UCS Chassis” video. In that video we demonstrated how long it took to unpack, rack, cable and power-up a new UCS chassis. I also talked about the time required to to complete the configuration and boot ESXi from the new blade.

But I didn’t show you the actual configuration steps and that is what this new video will do. I’ve been asked why I didn’t include the configuration minutes in the first video. The primary reason is that the screen capture software I used (Snag-It) recorded it in a resolution that turned out to be too low to be useful.

The solution was to re-record the configuration minutes, this time at a high quality. For this I used Screenflow software. I walked through the exact same steps to enable the interfaces, discover the new chassis & blade and then create a Service Profile to boot ESXi from the new blade.

As you can see, there isn’t a lot too it. UCS Manager takes care of most of the work.

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Mar 06 2011

Adding an extra UCS Chassis

Categories:

Compute

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The architecture of the Cisco UCS blade system is fundamentally different from the others in the market place. There is no intelligence and no configuration build into the blade chassis itself. In fact, you won’t even find a management port on the chassis.

Instead, the UCS architecture is build around centralizing the intelligence in a pair of Fabric Interconnects (FI’s). These FI’s run the UCS Manager software which is responsible for all of the intelligence and configuration of (with version 1.4 up to 20) multiple UCS chassis under it’s control. This creates a ‘virtual chassis’ and adding extra capacity by either adding a new chassis and/or a new blade is extremely simple and fast as there is no configuration that needs to take place.

In talking to customers about their experiences with blades in general, the ‘blade 17 problem’ often comes up. Customers are happy with their blades and chassis until the moment it is full with 16 blades, and the next project arrives and the need for blade 17 (HP/Dell chassis hold 16 blades, IBM 14). Adding an extra chassis takes the same amount of work as the first chassis. The exact same configuration steps need to be run again and change windows need to be requested to connect to the LAN and SAN. You know what I’m talking about if you have these systems.

Cisco UCS doesn’t have the ‘blade 17 problem’. For one, the Cisco chassis has 8 slots and not 16, so one could argue we have a ‘blade 9 problem’. However due to the architecture where there is no intelligence in the Cisco UCS chassis – not even a management port – the situation is quite different.

But instead of talking about it – we decided to record our experience when we received an extra chassis for our Amsterdam demo lab. Our existing UCS system consisted of a pair of Fabric Interconnects (6120’s) and a single chassis. You will see all the steps required to unpack, rack, cable and power up an extra chassis. We recorded the time with an iPhone stopwatch to show you how we are doing in time. I did not cut out any footage, but did fast-forward where appropriate.

I hope you enjoyed the recording. As you might have noticed, we didn’t stop after powering up the chassis. We continued through the boot & discovery process and we assigned a service profile to a blade which we then booted to run ESXi. In this recording we did document the time for that but in editing I decided it was going to make the recording too long.

Right now I’m considering creating a Part 2 – where I focus on discovery of the chassis & blade. Are you interested in that Part 2?

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Mar 06 2011

UCSM – Pools, Policies and Templates

Categories:

Compute

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The architecture of the Cisco UCS system is build around a ‘stateless’ system with an extremely flexible XLM API. You will need to learn to use this flexibility to reap all of the benefits UCS offers you. UCS Manager, the software that controls the entire UCS system, is build into the Fabric Interconnects and is what you use to configure UCS.

UCSM delivers the stateless compute through so called Service Profiles (I won’t repeat fantstic Sean’s explanation of that). These service profiles are build by leveraging pools, policies and templates.

The following takes you through the steps to setup your UCS system leveraging the power of pools, policies and templates.

What you have seen is how, using UCSM, you create a catalog of connectivity options that you then pick & choose from when you create service profile templates. Having this connectivity catalog give you fantastic flexibility in setting up your UCS system.

 

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