CISCO has launched UCS (unified computing system) few years back and this makes really easy to manage IT environment. CISCO UCS 5k chassis (containing 8 blades), fabric interconnect(6k) and fabric extender (2k) ie FEX make UCS environment where FCOE protocol is used. In a tipical setup, two FEX will be connected to one chassis. Each FEX has 8 Ethernet and 2 FC ports. Two downlink connection will be for single blade, each from FEX. You don't need to manually do cabling. You need to insert FEX module. That's it. This is also called IO module.
Now, there will have one FCOE uplink to Fabric(A and B, for redundancy) to each CISCO fabric interconnect switch. Both A and B Fab will be connected in order to maintain failover. This is UCS setup. Number cable dramatically reduced. Hence, power consumption too.
In order to send out traffic to uplink, Nexus 5k switch can be used and this supports FCoE and other features too. In DC, generally we prefer Nexus 5k. All zonning, vlan and trunking are done in this switch. There is also redundancy here ie NX A and NX B. Your storage systems will be connected to this NexUS switch. Even backup will be connected to it. In order to sendout traffic from NEXUS, there are other lot of switches. In our environment, we use cat 6K. You can use NexUS 7k too. I heard somewhere MDS switch is also used. This is basically core switch which interfaces to ISP routers.
Now, in order to manage UCS, there is UCS manager which is accessible through GUI. Even you can manage everything through backend. You need to login into primay fabric interconnect switch and execute commands. From server installation to patching, upgrading(FW and software) can be done. UCSM has nice features.
If vmware ESX is setup on blades and if they form ESX cluster with FT enabled, then your IT environment is 100% up. I'll explain and provide more unusual details from time to time.
So, stay tune....take care :)
Now, there will have one FCOE uplink to Fabric(A and B, for redundancy) to each CISCO fabric interconnect switch. Both A and B Fab will be connected in order to maintain failover. This is UCS setup. Number cable dramatically reduced. Hence, power consumption too.
In order to send out traffic to uplink, Nexus 5k switch can be used and this supports FCoE and other features too. In DC, generally we prefer Nexus 5k. All zonning, vlan and trunking are done in this switch. There is also redundancy here ie NX A and NX B. Your storage systems will be connected to this NexUS switch. Even backup will be connected to it. In order to sendout traffic from NEXUS, there are other lot of switches. In our environment, we use cat 6K. You can use NexUS 7k too. I heard somewhere MDS switch is also used. This is basically core switch which interfaces to ISP routers.
Now, in order to manage UCS, there is UCS manager which is accessible through GUI. Even you can manage everything through backend. You need to login into primay fabric interconnect switch and execute commands. From server installation to patching, upgrading(FW and software) can be done. UCSM has nice features.
If vmware ESX is setup on blades and if they form ESX cluster with FT enabled, then your IT environment is 100% up. I'll explain and provide more unusual details from time to time.
So, stay tune....take care :)
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