Cisco Nexus B22HP FEX Deployment Guide It seems that Cisco hasn’t completed ticked off HP with their UCS line of servers, because they were able to collaborate on a fabric extender for the HP C-series chassis, the Nexus B22HP.  A fabric extender is a Cisco Nexus switch (typically a Nexus 2000) that is managed via an upstream Nexus 5500 switch.  It allows you to scale out your top of rack (TOR) switches and still manage them…

Cisco UCS Direct-Attached SAN New in Cisco UCS firmware 2.1 is the ability to directly-attached a fiber-channel SAN to the Fabric Interconnects; to see all the other cool features head on over to UCS Guru’s blog.  A few years ago, Cisco supported this very briefly before changing their minds because your sole method of governing access to the SAN was LUN Masking and not zoning.  In firmware 2.1 Cisco flipped the switch and added support for…

As many of you know I am now in full CCIE Datacenter study mode, and as such, I never seem to have as much time to blog and answer posted questions as I would like. However I felt compelled to take a break from my studies to write a post on the new Cisco UCS generation 3 Fabric Interconnect. I noticed the other day that Cisco have released the data sheet on the latest member…

UCS Manager 2.1 As you may be aware a major UCS Manager update has been in development for the past 12 Months or so, I have been keeping a keen eye on this as there are several aspects to the new release which I have wanted for a long time. As some of my blog readers would know, about 8 months ago I wrote a post entitled “UCS the perfect solution?” where I detail my…

PART 1 UCS Director (Cloupia at the time) about 2 years ago before Cisco acquired them. I was immediately excited about the possibilities this software brings to the table. While I enjoy manually building out new UCS Service Profiles, zoning, provisioning SAN storage and loading ESXi there is something to be said for automating all of those mundane processes. UCS Director is like having an easy button in UCSM that provisions new compute, storage and…

Boot from SAN 101 with Cisco UCS I take this same approach in the data center when I see a repetitive task on the horizon. Today, I want to help you understand how Boot from SAN works in a legacy blade environment and how UCS makes the task 100 times faster (literally). I should let you know right up front that I’m not a storage guru, but I’ve setup servers to Boot from SAN on…