Matthew Wronkowski – Escalation Engineer
Jose Martinez – Escalation Engineer
Unified Computing System (UCS) 2.0 - New Hardware & Software Features
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2
Cisco Support Community – Expert Series Webcast Today’s featured experts are Cisco Support
Escalation Engineers Jose Martinez and Matthew Wronkowski
We also have Expert Panelists Dave McFarland & Mike Timm to help answering technical questions during the live session
2
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 3
Thank You for Joining Us Today Today’s presentation will include audience polling
questions
We encourage you to participate!
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 4
Thank You for Joining Us Today
If you would like a copy of the presentation slides, click the PDF link in the chat box on the right or go to
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/data-center/unified-computing
Or, https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-22551
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 5
Polling Question 1
a) UCSM 2.0(1)
b) UCSM 1.4(1) or 1.4(3)
c) UCSM 1.3(1)
d) Don’t have a UCS system at this time
e) Other release
What Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) software are you currently using?
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 6
Submit Your Questions NowUse the Q&A panel to submit your questions. Experts will start responding those
Matthew Wronkowski – Escalation Engineer
Jose Martinez – Escalation Engineer
Unified Computing System (UCS) 2.0 - New Hardware & Software Features
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 8
Agenda UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS 6248 Fabric Interconnect
UCS 2208XP I/OM
Port-channel support
VIC 1280 adapter
UCS 2.0 Software IntroductioniSCSI boot support
Disjointed L2 support
VMDirectPath with vMotion
RedHat KVM with VM-FEX
HDD Health Status
UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 10
UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect 2nd Generation of 1RU Fabric Interconnect
PID: UCS-FI-6248UP
Total of 48 unified ports. 32 base board + 16 GEM
1/10GE and 1/2/4/8FC option
Slider based configuration for ports
New ASICs (Carmel / Sunnyvale) which improves many aspects of the switching capabilities:
• Lower latency (2 us)
• Bigger TCAM size (4k)
• Higher number of active VLANs (4k)
• Higher number of IGMP entries (2k)
• Better buffer allocation (higher number of buffer per port, number of unicast/multicast VoQ and egress queues among other)
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 11
UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect
Power Entry
Power Entry
Fan Module
Fan Module
Out of Band Mgmt10/100/1000
Console
Fabric InterconnectCluster Connectivity
N + N Redundant FANs
N + N Power Supplies
32 x Fixed ports: 1/10 GE or 1/2/4/8 FC Expansion Module (GEM)
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 12
UCS 6248UP Unified Ports
Use-cases
Native Fibre Channel
Flexible LAN & storage convergence based on business needs
Service can be adjusted based on the demand for specific traffic
FC Eth
Lossless Ethernet:1/10GbE, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS
Simplify switch purchase - remove ports ratio guess work
Increase design flexibility
Remove specific protocol bandwidth bottlenecks
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 13
UCS 6248UP Unified Ports
Ports on the base card or the Unified Port GEM Module can either be Ethernet or FC
Only a continuous set of ports can be configured as Ethernet or FC
Alternating Ethernet or FC are not supported
Ethernet Ports have to be the 1st set of ports
Port type changes take effect after next reboot of switch for Base board ports or power-off/on of the GEM for GEM unified ports.
Base card – 32 Unified Ports GEM – 16 Unified Ports
Eth FC Eth FC
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 14
UCS 6248UP Unified Ports• Each fabric is configured
independently
• Click on Fabric Interconnect
• Click on Configure Unified Ports
• Reboot warning displayed
• Require approx. 6 minutes
• Change SFP!
UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS 2208XP I/OM
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 16
UCS 2208XP I/OM
• 2nd Generation of IOModule (FEX)
• PID: UCS-IOM-2208XP
• 8x SFP+ uplinks for fiber or copper/twinax
• Total bandwidth per chassis 160Gig (80Gig per fabric)
• 32x GE ports to the backplane
• Access to blades can be discrete (pinned) or a port-channel connection
• Uses Woodside ASIC (Similar to Nexus 2232)
• Can operate with 1st Generation hardware
• Non-disruptive upgrade path
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 17
UCS 2208XP I/OM Throughput Increase
1st Generation 2nd Generation
2208XP
80 GigPer fabric
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 18
UCS 2208XP I/OM Discrete Mode
Slot 1 Slot 2
Slot 3 Slot 4
Slot 5 Slot 6
Slot 7 Slot 8
Slot 1 Slot 2
Slot 3 Slot 4
Slot 5 Slot 6
Slot 7 Slot 8
Double blade throughput using “Discrete” mode
10Gb per blade 20Gb per blade
1st Generation 2nd Generation
UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
Port-Channel Support
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 20
Port-channel Support
Up to 8 * 10 Gb aggregated bandwidth to each fabric in a chassis. Only supported with combination of 6248 FI and 2208 IOM. Port-channel is optional, default mode discrete (same as 1.4) UCSM automatically configures fabric-port-channel based on Discovery
Policy and Hardware Capability Per chassis connection policy Discrete to port-channel is per side change to minimize disruption (no
explicit re-ack is required) Better redundancy. Add/remove PO members will cause traffic re-
distribution Supported no of links in a port-channel: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 or 8 Load Balancing
• Better traffic distribution among IOM uplinks and thus better link utilization
• Load balancing NOT user-configurable, implicitly managed by UCSM
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 21
Chassis Discovery Policies• Global Discovery Policy
• Per-Chassis Policy
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 22
UCS I/OM Mode Comparison4 LINKS, DISCREET
slot 1
slot 2
slot 3
slot 4slot 5slot 6slot 7
slot 8
FEX
8 LINKS, DISCREET
slot 1
slot 2
slot 3
slot 4slot 5slot 6slot 7
slot 8
8 LINKS, PORT-CHANNEL
Available Bandwidth Per Blade—10 Gb(5gb Per Side)
Available Bandwidth Per Blade—20 Gb
(10 Gb Per Side)
Available Bandwidth Per
Blade—up to 160 Gb (80 Gb Per Side)
Fabric Interconnect
Fabric Interconnect
Fabric Interconnect
FEX
FEX
• Statically pinned to Individual fabric links
• Deterministic Path
• Statically pinned to Individual fabric links
• Deterministic Path
• No oversubscription, each blade gets 20 Gb
• Statically pinned to Port-channel
• Shared bandwidth, better bandwidth utilization.
UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS VIC1280
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 24
UCS VIC 1280
Dual 4x 10 GE port-channels to a single server slot Host connectivity PCIe Gen2 x16 HW Capable of 256 PCIe devices
• OS restriction apply PCIe virtualization OS independent (same as M81KR) Single OS driver image for both M81KR and 1280 VIC Fabric Failover supported
• 128 VIFs (116 user VIFs) when paired with UCS 6148 FI and 2208 I/OM
• Port-channel configuration done automatically by system
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 25
UCS VIC 1280
UCS Blade Server
VIC 1280
2208 IOM 2208 IOM
Fabric Interconnects
Adaptor Links PC
(user configurable)
(system configured)
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 26
UCS VIC 1280
Pinned to PC
IOM 2208VIC 1280 adaptor with DCE links in Port Channel
Regular adaptor with single 10G link
• No slot based pinning• Port-Channel to Port-Channel pinning• No Invalid Link Count
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 27
New Hardware CompatibilityFabric Interconnect
IOM Adapter Connectivity benefits per side
6100 2104 UCS M81 KR Fabric and host connectivity same as Balboa 1.4(1)
6100 2208 UCS M81 KR All 8 IOM ports in discrete mode10 Gb to the host
6100 2104 UCS1280 VIC 4 IOM ports in discrete mode5 Gb to the host
6100 2208 UCS1280 VIC All 8 IOM ports in discrete mode40 Gb to the host
6200 2104 UCS M81 KR 4 IOM ports in discrete mode5 Gb to the host
6200 2208 UCS M81 KR All 8 IOM ports can be leveraged in Port-channel mode10 Gb to the host
6200 2104 UCS1280 VIC All 8 IOM ports in discrete mode10 Gb to the host
6200 2208 UCS1280 VIC All 8 IOM ports can be leveraged in Port-channel mode40 Gb to the host
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 28
Maximum VIFs supported by hardware
Generation 1 hw Generation 2 hw
Fabric Interconnect
61xx (Gatos)512 max vifs
128 max vifs (per switch port)
62xx (Carmel)4096 max-vifs
Flexible allocation across switch ports
IO Module 2104 (Redwood) Pre-defined vntag offsets
for 8 slots
2208 (Woodside)Dynamic global vntag
translation
Adaptor Card
M81KR (Palo)128 vntag namespace
VIC 1280 (Sereno)256 vntag namespace
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 29
VIF Allocation Scheme
Max no. of user vifs (vnics+vhbas) available to a slot (adaptor) = (15*n) – 2 n = no. of acknowledged iom uplinks
Max no. of user vifs (vnics+vhbas) available to a slot (adaptor) = (63*n) – 2 n = no. of acknowledged iom uplinks
• Generation 1
• Generation 2
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 30
Polling Question 2
a) Yes, UCS 6248 FI
b) Yes, UCS 2208XP I/OM
c) Yes, UCS 6248 FI and UCS 2208XP I/OM
d) Not yet
Have you deployed new hardware in your environment?
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 31
Submit Your Questions NowUse the Q&A panel to submit your questions. Experts will start responding those
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
iSCSI Boot Support
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 33
iSCSI Boot Support
Allows stateless model with no FC or FCoE in the environment Limited adapter support
• Cisco VIC and VIC-1280 (iBFT only, no iSCSI offloads)
• Broadcom 57711 M51KR (full offload, iSCSI HBA)
Operating System support • ESXi 4.1U1
• Windows 2008 R2 and R2SP1
• RHEL 5.6, 6.0 and 6.1
iSCSI Hardware Offload is not a requirement to support booting, only supporting iSCSI Boot Firmware Table (iBFT) in the option ROM
This is the first UCS release represents an iSCSI device in the model as well as the GUI/CLI/API
New pools and policies to support iSCSI vNIC attributes in the LAN tab
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 34
iSCSI Service Profiles
A service profile for iSCSI boot will have subtle changes from a normal Service Profile. There is now an iSCSI vnic that needs to be created. Creating a Service Profile iSCSI boot must be done from the Expert Service Profile creation tool.
There is an iSCSI adapter policy that needs to be used with the Service Profile. We will go over the policy and variables and what they do.
There is also a new IP pool that can be used to automatically assign IP addresses to the iSCSI vnics.
One caveat is an option for a pool of iqn initiator names that can automatically be assigned to iSCSI intitiators. For now this needs to be filled in by hand by the user. An enhancement for this is in the works.
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 35
iSCSI Adapter Policy Broadcom
• For installs, Boot to Target must be disabled. This forces the blade to bypass a bootable disk image and gain access to vMedia/DVD/PXE for installation
• After installation, Boot to Target must be enabled
• You can create an install policy and boot policy and change the SP as needed
• Or set the boot policy and during the initial install, break into Broadcom option ROM and disable Boot to Target (one time only)
• OS support for TCP off-load
VIC• No TCP off-load support
• Boot-to-Target is not used
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
Disjointed L2 Support
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 37
Disjointed L2 Support Non-symmetric VLANs on uplink
Multiple Layer 2 networks upstream
Native support in End-Host mode allows simplification of configuration (no need for Switch mode)
By default 1.4 behavior is preserved (all VLANs present in all uplinks)
Hardware independent feature (supported in 6100 and 6200 FI)
Max of 31 disjointed Layer 2 domains supported
Overlapping VLAns are not supported
Per VLAN broadcast/multicast listener
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 38
Disjointed L2 Support• UCS pre-2.x
Network 1VLAN 10,20,31,32
FI-A BIF 1 BIF 2 BIF 3
FI-BBIF 1 BIF 2 BIF 3
Network 1VLAN 10,20,31,32
Network 1VLAN 10,20,31,32
Network 1VLAN 10,20
BIF 1 BIF 2 BIF 3
Network 2VLAN 31,32
Network 3VLAN 11,12
BIF 1 BIF 2 BIF 3
• UCS 2.x
FI-A FI-B
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
VMDirectPath with vMotion
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 40
VMDirectPath with vMotion
Data traffic from VM bypasses hypervisor
Available in vSphere 5.0
Other names it is known by• VM-FEX High Performance Mode
• UPT
• VMDirectPath Gen2
Co-exists with standard mode – Cisco VIC required
Does not follow the vNetwork distributed switch model –PCI devices explicitly assigned
UCS specifically called out in vSphere 5 Networking Guide
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 41
Modes of VM-FEX
vSphere
Standard Mode
vEth
vEth
vNIC
vNIC vNIC
vNIC
High Performance Mode (UPT)
vSphere
vEth
vEth
Standard Mode Each VM gets a dedicated
PCIe device 12%-15% CPU performance
improvement Appears as distributed
vNetwork switch to hypervisor
vMotion supported
High Performance Mode
Co-exists with Standard mode
Bypasses Hypervisor layer
30% improvement in I/O performance
Appears as distributed vNetwork switch to hypervisor
vMotion supported
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 42
VMDirectPath Rules of Engagement
A VM vNIC always connects to VM-FEX in standard mode. If it is marked for UPT, ESX will attempt to switch it to UPT after few seconds. ESX will always switch a VM vNIC to standard mode before disconnecting from VM-FEX. Ex. vMotion.
• During mode switches, some packets are dropped. This is acceptable because the higher level protocols will retransmit.
• The mode switches are invisible to the guest OS. He does not know if his vNIC is in standard or UPT mode
• The mode switch between is not a link transition (up/down) on the network. As said before, it is invisible to the OS.
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
RedHat KVM with VM-Fex
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 44
RedHat KVM with VM-Fex Adapter FEX extends port-extender (Pre-standard 802.1Qbh) architecture
to PCIe bus on hosts – to virtualize the network/cable/NIC construct
VM-FEX further extends port-extender architecture to virtual machines
Each VM gets its own PCIe device and a virtual port on the UCS Fabric Interconnect
Architecture for VMware has been around since ESX4.0 update 1
VM-FEX with KVM works with the VIC adapters for hardware-based switching to VM interfaces
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 45
RedHat KVM with VM-Fex
……
UCS Switch
Cis
co V
IC
Adapter Port
Switch Port
……
Use
rK
erne
l
Macvtap Interface
Netdev Interface
Libvirt
ManagementTools
Netlink Socket
Application
virtio-net
eth1
Macvtap 1
vhost-net
KVM
Guest OS
Guest 2
Application
virtio-net
Guest OS
Guest 1
eth2
Macvtap 2
vhost-net
eth0 ethn
PF VF1 VF2 VFn
Port Profile1: Qos1, vlan1
Port Profile2: Qos2, vlan2
Veth 1 Veth 2
Port Profile2: Qos2, vlan2
Port Profile1: Qos1, vlan1
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
HDD Health Status
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 47
HDD Health Status New HDD Fault Monitoring provides UCSM with blade-resident HDD
status
Important because: Previous releases provided no HDD status to UCSM
Feature only applies to B200 and B250 blade (LSI 1064E Raid Controller)
No support for c-series
Only error conditions that can be reported by the LSI1064E to the CIMC are covered
For each HDD slot only one unidirectional fault signal from the LSI1064E to the CIMC
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 48
References Cisco Support Community
https://supportforums.cisco.com/
Unified Computing System Communityhttps://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/data-center/unified-computing
Cisco.com pageshttp://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10265/index.html
Support pages: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/ps11544/tsd_products_support_series_home.html
Designing Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centershttp://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/Virtualization/securecldg.html
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 49
Books Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
http://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1587141930
I/O Consolidation in the Data Centerhttp://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=158705888X
Network Virtualizationhttp://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1587052482
Data Center Fundamentalshttp://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1587050234
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 50
Recommended Reading For YourReference
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 51
Polling Question 3
a) Yes
b) No, I am using Fibre Channel
c) No, but planning to migrate
d) No, I have no plans of migrating
Are you currently doing stateless boot with Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI)?
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 52
Q&A
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 53
We Appreciate Your Feedback!
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$20 USD Gift Certificate
To complete the evaluation, please click on link provided in the chat or after closing your browser.
Ask The Experts Event (with Jose and Matthew
If you have additional questions, you can ask them to Expert He will be answering from day February 7 to February 17th.
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/ask-the-expert
You can watch the video or read the Q&A 5 business days after the event athttps://supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro/ask-the-expert/webcasts
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 55
Next CSC Expert Series Webcast in Portuguese
Tuesday February 14, at 1:30 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time (UTC-2 hours)
3:30 p.m WET Lisbon (UTC),
7:30 a.m PST San Francisco (UTC -8 hours)
Join Cisco Support Engineer
Valter Pereira
During the live event you will learn about the features of Cisco IronPort ESA (Cisco IronPort Email Security Appliance), how to manage it and how to troubleshoot most common issues.
During this interactive session you will be able ask all your questions related to this topic.
You can register at: https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/portuguese or directly athttp://tools.cisco.com/gems/cust/customerSite.do?METHOD=E&LANGUAGE_ID=P&PRIORITY_CODE=4&SEMINAR_CODE=S15938
Topic: Cisco IronPort Email Security Technology
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 56
Next CSC Expert Series Webcast in Polish
Tuesday February 21, at 10:00 a.m CEST Warsaw
9:00 a.m London
Join Cisco Support Engineer
Mateusz Grajewski
During the live event you will learn how to increase the effectiveness and reliability of wireless transmission through the use of Cisco wireless network technologies such as ClientLink, BandSelect, VideoStream, and CleanAir
During this interactive session you will be able ask all your questions related to this topic.
You’ll be able to register starting next Thursday at
https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/etc/netpro-polska
Topic: Wireless Transmission Optimization Technologies Available at Cisco Devices
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 57
We invite you to actively collaborate in the Cisco Support Community and social media
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© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 58
We have communities in other languages
If you speak Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, or Polish, we invite you to ask your questions and collaborate in your language.
• Spanish https://supportforums.cisco.com/community/spanish
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We’re also running a pilot for Russian You can register at the following link:
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