Boudewijn Plomp

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My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)

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This is part 6 and also the last part of the following blog series:

If you haven’t read the previous part, then I recommend you read them. On the other hand this will be a short one, because there is not that much to tell. Although the title of this blog is about System Center I want to show you three topics.

Partner Ecosystem Software:

Cisco has a partner ecosystem with software for management of Cisco UCS. When you go to the Cisco support page you can download a lot of tools/add-ins. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)

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This is part 5 of the following blog series:

I hope part 1, 2, 3 and 4 where informative to you. In this part it is time to talk about an actual Hyper-V Cluster on UCS Blade Servers. Hosting a Hyper-V Cluster on UCS is not rocket science. The deployment is just as straightforward as with other brands. The only difference is that you are (more) flexible with your network configuration and you have the benefits from stateless computing, if that is what you want.

In our case we had eight physical UCS B200 M3 Blade Servers available as specified in part 2. When you have pre-configured UCS Manager with all pools and policies that are required, you are ready to create a Server Profile. You can then assign the new Server Profile to a physical server (equipment), boot it and begin installing the Operating System. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 4 – Quality of Services)

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This is part 4 of the following blog series:

Quality of Services:

I hope you enjoyed reading part 1, 2 and 3. As explained Cisco UCS is a converged infrastructure. A converged infrastructure uses less cabling and allows you to configure vNIC’s and vHBA’s as an abstraction layer on top of the physical infrastructure. This offers flexibility and has some benefits. It also adds an important requirement, which is QoS (Quality of Services). Without QoS, any type of traffic could saturate all available bandwidth resulting in slow network or storage performance. Which could potentially make your compute platform unstable. It is important that each type of traffic can consume as much bandwidth as possible when needed, but when the network gets congested each type of traffic gets a fare share of bandwidth, shaped by a pre-defined weight (%).

The nice thing is, Cisco UCS fully supports QoS. In fact, it is an absolute requirement which is easy to configure. QoS is not only used for traffic shaping, it is also used to handle certain type of traffic differently. Like storage traffic (especially Fiber Channel traffic) needs to be lossless (without packet drops). And you might want certain type of traffic (like iSCSI traffic) to use a different MTU packet size (e.g. Jumbo Frames with MTU 9000).

With this blog I am not going to explain QoS in technical detail. I will give you some links to technical resources that were useful to me. And I will explain what you can and need to configure in UCS Manager. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 3 – Hardware Configuration)

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This is part 3 of the following blog series:

Hardware Configuration:

If you have read part 1 and part 2 you should now know a bit more about Cisco UCS and our hardware combination. In this part I will share you my hands-on experience with Cisco UCS. Note I am not going to explain how I configured the Nexus switches, Catalyst switches, ASA firewalls and NetApp storage devices. With this blog I want to focus on Cisco UCS in general. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 2 – Hardware Overview)

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This is part 2 of the following blog series:

Hardware Overview:

If you have read part 1 you should now know a bit more about a Cisco FlexPod. As mentioned, a Cisco FlexPod is a reference architecture and can be combined with any hardware you want, which makes is very flexible and scalable. With the budget at that time we started with the following hardware infrastructure:

Cisco FlexPod (hardware overview)

Altough this pictures might look nice to you, it is quite useless if you don’t know what it is all about. So I have to give you some detailed information about the hardware and it’s capabilities. I am afraid this is going to be a long blog. But hey, let’s go for it! 🙂  [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)

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This is part 1 of the following blog series:

Introduction:

Two years ago I had the opportunity to design, develop and implement a new public and private cloud infrastructure. Because we were going to host multiple customers (tenants) including our selves on a shared infrastructure this required a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment. As you may probably know, a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment brings a lot of challenges that you have to deal with. We were going to use Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 and SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2012 R2 as the virtualization platform. Because it was going to be a private and public cloud service it required the right hardware that is highly scalable. At that time we looked at DELL, HP and Cisco for compute, network and storage. At the end we pulled the plug and chose for a Cisco FlexPod solution. And this is where it all started…

Well, I can tell you now; Cisco FlexPod is awesome! Now that we have our infrastructure running for about two years I am so enthusiastic about this system that is literally made a kind of career shift for me. I am not going totally for Cisco instead of Microsoft, but more a combination of both. As we would say, best of both worlds! And this already brought me a lot of new opportunity’s. Because I am so enthusiastic about a Cisco FlexPod (or better known as Cisco UCS with NetApp) I get a lot of questions from people around me. That’s why I decided to write this blog, to share my experience and hopefully make other people as enthusiastic as me. Did I just say the word ‘enthusiastic’ four times? 😉

If you are interested in this topic than I recommend you to read this blog. Please understand that there are so many things to write about and that I can’t go into too much detail on each topic. I have chosen only a few topics that might be interesting. You can expect more blogs from me that go into more technical detail. So, stay tuned… [Read more…]