Computers and their various peripherals have some unique identities, such as universally unique identifiers (UUIDs), media access control (MAC) addresses of network interface cards (NICs), World Wide Node Numbers (WWNNs), and Word Wide Port Numbers (WWPNs) for host bus adapters (HBAs). These identities are used to uniquely identify a computer system in a network. For traditional computers and peripherals, these identities were burned into the hardware and, hence, couldn't be altered easily. Operating systems and some applications rely on these identities and may fail if these identities are changed. In the event of a full computer system failure or the failure of a computer peripheral with a unique identity, administrators have to follow cumbersome firmware upgrade procedures to replicate the identities of the failed components on the replacement components.

The Unified Computing System (UCS) platform introduced the idea of creating identity and resource pools to abstract the compute node identities from UCS Manager (UCSM) instead of using the hardware's burned-in identities. In this chapter, we'll discuss the different pools you can create during UCS deployment and server provisioning. We'll start by looking at what pools are and then discuss the different types of pools, and learn how to configure each of them.

The list of topics that will be covered in the chapter is as follows:

• Understanding identity and resource pools
• Learning to create a UUID pool
• Learning to create a MAC pool
• Learning to create a WWNN pool
• Learning to create a WWPN pool
• Creating IP pools
• Understanding the server pool
• Learning to create server pool membership and qualification policies