CCIE Data Center Unified Computing Background and Physical Architecture

UCS Demand and Common Deployments

! UCS market is extremely hot right now ! Cisco is adding 60 new UCS TAC jobs right now in RTP
! For perspective, only 20 TAC engineers dedicated to switching

! ~80% of customers run a mix of hypervisors and bare metal on their B-Series UCS blade chassis
! Of the bare-metal installs, overwhelming majority is Win2k8R2 Server

! ~20% run hypervisors alone on blades, and of those

! ~95% are VMware ! ~4% are HyperV ! ~1% are XenServer
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UCS Demand and Common Deployments

! Still many customers wish/need to run rackmount C-Series servers ! Boot-from-SAN has literally exploded especially over the past 2 years
! This is largely due to how easy Cisco UCS makes it

! In fact, the majority of installs use boot-from-SAN compared to 2008 when virtually no one did it
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Cisco UCS Competitive Advantages ! Ciscos major competitive advantages have been
! UCS Manager open XML API ! Lack of intelligence or switching at the chassis level ! VN-Tag / VN-Link providing true NIV

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UCS Platform Emulator

! Download from http://developer.cisco.com
! (login required)

! Gives you almost an exact replication of the UCS Management ! Cant build or boot any actual servers ! Can do 99% of all the system GUI tasks ! Connect to NX-OS and Local-Mgmt not supported (talk about these CLIs later)
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Physical Architecture of UCS

! Fabric Interconnects (FIs)
! Core of the UCS platform ! Everything connects to FIs ! FIs run the actual UCSManager software

! Chassis
! Chassis contains blades, but no intelligence ! Blades contain CPU/RAM/CNAs

! IOM
! IO muxes data from FIs to Blades ! CMS (Chassis Management Switch)
! Carries Management traffic to/from CIMC on FI

! CMC (Chassis Management Controller)

! Monitors all sensors, voltage, controls fan speed ! Used in discovery of the chassis, blades and IOMs
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