Why Cisco UCS Rocks #7: Flexible Manageability
Quick Overview of Cisco UCSM
UCSM Service Profiles
208 Servers; 2 Points of Management
NetApp needed to build a converged infrastructure to meet all their testing requirements—which is basically everything, because their customers run everything. Enter Cisco UCS.
By choosing Cisco UCS, NetApp was able to:
- Deploy 10,000 VMs in <1 hour
- Maximize storage efficiency: 500GB for 500 VMs
- Achieve 100 times client capacity at same infrastructure cost
- Enable one-box NFS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE connectivity
- Test over 10GbE, 1GbE, FC, FCoE
- Simplify with one wire + automation
- Reduce cabling by 78%
When NetApp needed to deploy a scalable testing cloud capable of hosting 23,000 virtual machines, the company’s engineering support services chose Cisco Unified Computing System. The first step consolidated 714 existing servers onto 120 blade servers in a single Cisco UCS platform, reducing 168 management points to just one: the pair of Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects.
— Cisco UCS: IT Agility Delivered
Initial Phase
- (20) FAS3170 pairs for unified storage
- 208 Cisco UCS Blades
- 23,000 VMs
- 272 Cisco UCS Blades additional (480 total)
- 30,000 VMs additional (53,000 total, another 69,000 planned)
Oh, and by the way . . .
- It's completely diskless, and
- Using NetApp FlexClone, 500 VMs took only 500GB of storage.
Beyond One Fabric: UCS Central
Get more info about UCS Central from this episode of TechWiseTV:
And since this blog post is already phenomenally long, I will just mention—there's even more integration available, especially with VMware. Enter the UCSM vCenter Plugin, and vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) for UCS.
vCenter Plugin for UCSM
- Lists available Service Profiles (SP), SP Templates, Server Pool, Host Firmware Pack
- Reload UCS Domain
- Associate Server pool to SP Templates
- Associate Host Firmware Pack to SP Template
- Create Hardware or Template based Service Profile
- Associate and Disassociate Service Profiles
- Manage associated BIOS Policy and modify BIOS settings
- Manage Host Firmware Pack
vCO Plugin for UCS
- Application of a service profile to a UCS blade
- Cloning a service profile template to a service profile
- Service profile customization of frequently modified components
- Import and export of service profiles from and to UCS Manager instances
Integration and automation with VMware. Nice!