Recently I attended a session on UCS and was completely amazed at the amount of work put in by CISCO folks on the UCS and hence i decided to briefly explain the various components of UCS and why it is such an amazing product . True to its name , CISCO’s UCS is a complete unified system that addresses some limitations with Servers that are available in the market today . UCS Blade Servers combined with the management software UCS Manager makes a great product. UCS seems to have been inspired from VMware in making the product Scalable , Manageable and Reliable. UCS is made for the Enterprise and purposely built for Virtualization . A strong 10GE and SAN infrastructure would make UCS an invaluable asset to any Organization .
UCS is available in two variants :
- B Series – Blade Servers
- C Series – Rack Mount Servers
B Series Blade Servers :
UCS B Series is made up of Blade Chassis that consists of Blades and Fabric Extenders that connects to a Fabric Switch with Expansion Modules which in turn connects to the Corporate Network. All UCS Blade chassis and its components can be managed from UCS Manager .
UCS Manager :
- Provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components ( Adapters,Blades,chassis , fabric Extenders and Fabric Interconnects ) of the Cisco Unified Computing System – across multiple chassis and thousands of virtual machines.
- UCS Manager can be used to Discover , Configure , Inventory , Monitor , Diagnose and collect statistics of all the components.
- CLI can also be used to manage the chassis and its components
- OS Installations can be carried out from UCS Manager
- KVM Consoles for the blades are available through UCS Manager
Blade Chassis & Its Components :
UCS consists of a 6U Blade Chassis with a standard front to back cooling that is scalable and flexible . This chassis can accommodate 8 Half Height Blades or 4 Full Height blades or a combination of half and full height blades .
Half Height variants that are available are :
Cisco UCS B200 M1 – Intel Xeon 5500 series powered dual processor with 12 DIMM slots that supports upto 96GB RAM and consists of 2 Internal 2.5″” SAS HDDs with an integrated RAID support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
Cisco UCS B200 M2 – Intel Xeon 5600 series powered dual processor with 12 DIMM slots that supports upto 96GB RAM and consists of 2 Internal 2.5″” SAS HDDs with an integrated RAID support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
Full Height Blades variants that are available are
Cisco UCS B250 M1 Extended Memory Blade Server – Intel Xeon 5500 series powered dual processor with 48 DIMM slots that supports upto 384GB RAM and consists of 2 Internal 2.5″” SAS HDDs with an integrated RAID support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
Cisco UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Server – Intel Xeon 5600 series powered dual processor with 48 DIMM slots that supports upto 96GB RAM and consists of 2 Internal 2.5″” SAS HDDs with an integrated RAID support for RAID 0 and RAID 1
Cisco UCS B440 M1 High Performance Blade Server – Intel Xeon 7500 series powered Quad processor with 32 DIMM slots that supports upto 256GB RAM and consists of 4 Internal 2.5″” SAS HDDs with an integrated RAID support for RAID 0 , 1 , 5 and RAID 6 .
Fabric Switch is available in 20 Port and 40 Port configuration .
Expansion Modules is available in FC only ( 8 SFP Ports that run 1,2 & 4 Gbps FC ) , Combo FC + Ethernet ( 4 SFP+ Ports that run 10GE & 4 SFP Ports that run 1,2 & 4 Gbps FC ) or Ethernet only ( 6 SFP+ ports that run 10GE )
Service Profiles
- Service Profiles stores a server personality which includes UUID of the Server , identity of NIC and HBA , Boot order and various policies and what Service Profiles brings to UCS is Server Mobility .
- Service Profiles can be disassociated and associated with any blade across any UCS Chassis. This helps administrators move Applications between blades provided OS and Data Resided on the SAN
- Service Profiles can be cloned or deployed from Templates . Service profiles are associated with blades and can be moved between various blades .
- Auto populating Server Pool is another cool feature wherein administrators can create an empty server pool and map it to a Server pool qualification specifying various qualification that could qualify a server for the requirement and the server would automatically be placed in the Pool
Monitoring and Reporting
- We can configure call home to automatically notify CISCO or Administrators in case of any faults with the UCS Blades
- Upto 3 Syslog Server can be configured to log events associated with the servers
- SNMP is supported
- Threshold policies can be set to trigger alarms based on conditions
- inventory reports can be exported
- Statistics is used to display statistics of almost all components that are part of UCS
Some advantages of UCS are
- Centralised monitoring and reporting of all components of UCS
- Move Applications across various blades using Server Profiles
- Virtualization ready
- Server Mobility
- Diskless Configuration i.e SAN Boot is completely supported
- Scale upto 40 Chassis and 320 Computer nodes
- Granular Delegated Management is possible
To Conclude I believe UCS would be a great asset in environments with a Strong 1oGE and SAN infrastructure . UCS Manager is a great piece of management software that could help in managing and reporting centrally but will need some time for the administrators to get used to .
For more on UCS ,
Comparison between UCS and HP Blade : http://www.bythebell.com/2010/07/cisco-ucs-vs-hp-bladesystem-matrix-an-update.html
All Things UCS : http://viewyonder.com/cisco-ucs/
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