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

August 27, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp

This is part 4 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)

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)

May 19, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp

This is part 3 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)

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)

March 2, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp

This is part 2 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)

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:

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…]