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

My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)
My first FlexPod! (Part 2 – Hardware Overview)
My first FlexPod! (Part 3 – Hardware Configuration)
My first FlexPod! (Part 4 – Quality of Services)
My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)
My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)

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…]

This is part 1 of the following blog series:

My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)
My first FlexPod! (Part 2 – Hardware Overview)
My first FlexPod! (Part 3 – Hardware Configuration)
My first FlexPod! (Part 4 – Quality of Services)
My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)
My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)

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…]