Proper planning of data center power, cooling, spacing, and environmental factors will not only optimize the data center resources, it will also bring down the operational cost of manage devices. Cisco UCS hardware components have been designed with efficient power supplies, front-to-rear cooling, a unified fabric to reduce cabling requirements, and fewer network components for easy and simplified management of data centers. In this chapter, we learned rack installation and the installation of UCS hardware components such as chassis, blade, I/O module, Fabric Interconnect, and rack servers. We also discussed Cisco SingleConnect technology, an efficient way to connect blade servers, rack servers, and virtual machines in a data center.

In the next chapter, we will learn about Cisco UCS Emulator which is an excellent tool for exploring UCSM software.