Cisco delivers new hardware for UCS soon!

Cisco
Aug 092011

As a more and more Server-, Storage- and virtualization engineer I’m more then exited to see that Cisco is evolving there Cisco UCS platform with 3 more new products which I received in a marketing e-mail from Cisco.

New Fabric Interconnect (Cisco UCS 6248UP) that doubles the switching capacity of the data center fabric to improve workload density (from 520Gbps to 1Tbps), reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent to improve application performance  and provides flexible unified ports to improve infrastructure agility and transition to a fully converged fabric.

New Chassis I/O Module (Cisco UCS 2208XP) that doubles the bandwidth to the chassis (from 40Gb to 80Gb) to improve application performance and handle workload bursts (from 80Gb to 320Gb to the blade).

New Virtual Interface Card (Cisco UCS VIC 1280) that quadruples the bandwidth to the server to improve application performance (from dual 10Gb to dual 40Gb) and doubles the number of virtual interfaces to improve Virtual Machine workload density (from 128 interfaces to 256 interfaces). It also offers a choice of Hypervisor to customers by expanding VM-FEX technology to Linux based hypervisors (KVM based on RHEL 6.1).

Besides all this new hardware, Cisco will also reveal Cisco UCS 2.0 which will contain some cool features including iSCSI Boot Support in UCS Service Profile

It was already being announced in July 12, 2011 at Cisco Live, Las Vegas. Sadly enough I couldn’t attend to this event since I don’t even live close. However M. Sean McGee apparently did.  Smile I can really recommend you read his blog since, IMHO it’s really cool.

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Cisco UCS Emulator

Cisco
Nov 062010

A few months ago I was certified for Cisco UCS Implementation. In our lab environment we are currently busy connecting and setting up our test UCS environment. However, just a few minutes ago I found a tool that is incredibly useful and I only wish I knew about it earlier.

I just found a Cisco UCS Emulator at the Cisco website. This could be really useful for development of course, however I’m more interested in the GUI to test things out. The download is about 224MB in size. The manual for this emulator can be found here.

After booting up the virtual machine, it is going to unpack and install the UCS Platform Emulator. Once it’s finished, the virtual machine is going to boot up the Cisco UCSPE (UCS Platform Emulator) & UCS Manager.

1 Booting Cisco UCS emulator

When done, you will see this screen:

2 UCS System booted

Above, you will find an URL containing an IP address configured for this virtual machine. When browsing to this URL using my web browser I’m presented the following window.

21 UCS manager webstart

When I hit the launch button, a JAVA client loads the UCS Manager. On my MacBook pro it took a little while before it was running, but hey I’m also running a Windows 7 VM :)

While loading you will see a screen that looks something like this:

3 Loading UCS manager

When it’s finished loading, you can login with the default UserID and Password.

3.1 Login Window UCS Manager

The default settings are:
UserID: config
Password: config

And, wow, I got a Cisco UCS Manager running on my system! Of course this is just an emulator but hey it’s less expensive then buying a UCS chassis!

4 UCS Manager

So if I want to try a new Service Profile, then it’s no problem at all.

5 Service Profile

So anyone who is currently studying for Cisco UCS, make sure you get this emulator. Also it’s very very useful while developing scripts or other applications to work with the Cisco UCS interface. It seems on the website it’s especially created for developers, but who’s going to stop you from using this for your studies?

I have to make a little note about the topic of development before I forget. For the developers amongst us, Cisco also created an UCS XML API Programmer’s Guide. I recommend that software engineers download this guide including the emulator if you are planning to use the UCS API’s.

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