Chapter 1, What’s New with Cisco UCS, will cover the third-generation of Cisco UCS products along with an introduction to Cisco UCS M-Series modular servers, UCS storage servers, and UCS Mini. This chapter can help you to understand various UCS products and select the best one for your data center and cloud computing solutions.
Chapter 2, Installing Cisco UCS Hardware, walks through UCS hardware component installation, such as Fabric Interconnect, chassis, blade, I/O module, and interface card, and discusses how to use Cisco Single Connect Technology to connect rack servers with Fabric Interconnect. It also covers power and cooling requirements.
Chapter 3, Setting Up a Lab using Cisco UCS Emulator, introduces the UCS Emulator, which is an excellent tool from Cisco that you can use to learn about UCS without a physical lab. Different UCS Emulator installation options are discussed, and configuring the UCS Emulator for lab usage is explained.
Chapter 4, Configuring Cisco UCS using UCS Manager, gives an overview of UCS Manager, which is the core management tool for the UCS platform. Readers will get acquainted with UCS Manager navigation and configuration options using both the graphical user interface and the command-line interface.
Chapter 5, Configuring LAN Connectivity, explains UCS network connectivity. UCS platform-unique features, including Fabric Interconnect operational modes, pin groups, port channels, virtual PortChannel, and Virtual Network Interface Card configuration, are explained along with both northbound and southbound network connectivities from Fabric Interconnects.
Chapter 6, Configuring SAN Connectivity, explains storage connectivity for different SAN protocols supported by the UCS platform. The configuration of protocols including FC, FCoE, and iSCSI is discussed, along with an introduction to unique UCS features, such as FC operational modes, VSANs, and uplink pinning.
Chapter 7, Creating Identity Resource Pools, Policies, and Templates, explains that pools are a very important topic in UCS, especially in relation to configuring service profiles. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the different pools you create during UCS deployments. We’ll start by looking at what pools are, and then we’ll discuss the different types of pool and show how to configure each of them.
Chapter 8, Creating and Managing Service Profiles, introduces identity and resource pools, which include UUID, MAC addresses, WWN, and server pools. Identity and resource pools are used for abstracting unique identities and resources for devices such as vNICs; vHBAs and server pools can assign servers in groups based on similar server characteristics.
Chapter 9, Managing UCS through Routine and Advanced Management, introduces the most common and advanced management tasks performed with UCS, from startup and shutdown to logging, upgrading firmware, licensing, and role-based access. These routine management tasks are crucial to understand in order to effectively administer Cisco UCS.
Chapter 10, Virtual Networking in Cisco UCS, explains the integration of Cisco UCS and the virtualization of hypervisors with VMware vSphere and Cisco Nexus 1000V Distributed Virtual Switch.
Chapter 11, Configuring Backup, Restore, and High Availability, covers UCS backup and restore options. This chapter also provides details of high availability configuration for UCS Fabric Interconnects.
Chapter 12, Cisco UCS Failure Scenarios Testing, discusses various failure scenarios that provide solutions for UCS troubleshooting to identify and resolve issues.
Chapter 13, Third-Party Application Integration, covers third-party applications, including VMware vCenter extension, goUCS automation toolkit, and EMC UIM.
Chapter 14, Automation and Orchestration of Cisco UCS, introduces using Cisco UCS Central for domain management, Performance Manager for health monitoring, and Cisco UCS Director for automation, and orchestrating all the infrastructure components: compute, network, storage, and virtualization.