During the UCS Bootcamp in San Jose, Cisco made it clear that the value proposition of UCS is the Stateless Model. Unlike traditional server deployment use of the Service Profile (I covered the Opt-In Model earlier in this series), the Stateless Model allows the physical hardware to become generic and, since the operating system and [...]

As a class and in smaller groups, I’ve participated in several discussions trying to understand UCS connectivity and communication both internally and externally to the LAN and the SAN. This post summarizes several diagrams and drawings from whiteboards, my notes, and the bootcamp manual to explain what hardware communicates with which protocol, and how redundancy [...]

Day 1 of the Cisco UCS Bootcamp partner training was mainly an introduction to the hardware, but also established the concept of UCS Server Profiles and Statelessness. Converged Network Fabric and the Cisco’s CNA (Converged Network Adapters) models were covered, and the day ended with a lab exploring the UCSM (Unified Compute System Manager).
I promised [...]