Cisco - UCS - Architecture

1. Introducing the Cisco Unified Computing System
The Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain. The main system components include:

• UCS System and Connectivity View

• Single Management Interface for up to 160 blade servers

• Role Based Access for LAN, SAN, and Server Administrators

• Clustered for fault tolerance and no single point of failure for any chassis

• Open APIs for third party integration

• Unified Computing System Manager

• Embedded device manager for family of UCS components

• Enables stateless computing via Service Profiles

• Efficient scale: Same effort for 1 to N blades

• APIs for integration with new and existing data centre infrastructure

• Single point of management for UCS system of components

• Adapters, blades, chassis, fabric extenders, fabric interconnects

• Embedded device manager

• Discovery, Inventory, Configuration, Monitoring, Diagnostics, Statistics Collection

• Coordinated deployment to managed endpoints

• APIs for integration with new and existing data centre infrastructure

• SMASH-CLP, IPMI, SNMP

• XML-based SDK for commercial & custom implementations

 2. UCS Technical System Architecture
What is a “stateless” computing architecture?

• Stateless client computing is where every compute node has no inherent state pertaining to the services it may host.

• In this respect, a compute node is just an execution engine for any application (CPU, memory, and disk – flash or hard drive).

• The core concept of a stateless computing environment is to separate state of a server that is built to host an application, from the hardware it can reside on.

• The servers can easily then be deployed, cloned, grown, shrunk, de-activated, archived, re-activated, etc

UCS Service Profiles

• Servers are specifically purchased for additional capacity and provide service elasticity

• Server identities are defined by the service profile

• Management of servers provided through the very system that defines them (UCSM).

3. Documents
UCS Management Deep Dive

Architecture of the Cisco UCS

Cisco UCS Administration and RBAC

Multi-UCS Management with UCS Central

UCS Networking Deep Dive