Tag Archives: Service Profile

10 Things That Cisco UCS Polices Can Do (That IBM, Dell or HP Can’t)

ViewYonder.com recently posted a great write up on some things that Cisco’s UCS can do that IBM, Dell or HP really can’t. You can go to ViewYonder.com to read the full article, but here are 10 things that Cisco’s UCS Polices do:

  • Chassis Discovery – allows you to decide how many links you should use from the FEX (2104) to the FI (6100).  This affects the path from blades to FI and the oversubscription rate.  If you’ve cabled 4 I can just use 2 if you want, or even 1.
  • MAC Aging – helps you manage your MAC table?  This affects ability to scale, as bigger MAC tables need more management.
  • Autoconfig – when you insert a blade, depending on its hardware config enables you to apply a specific template for you and put it in a organization automatically.
  • Inheritence – when you insert a blade, allows you to automatically create a logical version (Service Profile) by coping the UUID, MAC, WWNs etc.
  • vHBA Templates – helps you to determine how you want _every_ vmhba2 to look like (i.e. Fabric,  VSAN,  QoS, Pin to a border port)
  • Dynamic vNICs – helps you determine how to distribute the VIFs on a VIC
  • Host Firmware – enables you to determine what firmware to apply to the CNA, the HBA, HBA ROM, BIOS, LSI
  • Scrub – provides you with the ability to wipe the local disks on association
  • Server Pool Qualification – enables you to determine which hardware configurations live in which pool
  • vNIC/vHBA Placement – helps you to determine how to distribute VIFs over one/two CNAs?

For more on this topic, visit Steve’s blog at ViewYonder.com.  Nice job, Steve!