M. Sean McGee

July 15^th, 2011

This week at CiscoLive 2011 in Las Vegas, Cisco announced new additions to the Cisco UCS fabric architecture. In addition to the existing UCS fabric hardware, UCS customers now have a choice of a new Fabric Interconnect, a new chassis I/O module, and a new Virtual Interface Card.  The 6248UP Fabric Interconnect delivers double the throughput, almost half the latency, and more than quadruple the virtual interfaces per downlink, while the new 2208XP chassis I/O module delivers double the chassis uplink bandwidth and quadruple the server downlinks.  Last but not least, the 1280 Virtual Interface Card (VIC) server adapter provides quadruple the fabric bandwidth for UCS blade servers by delivering two active 40 Gbps paths per server.

Did I mention these new announcements were additions to the UCS product portfolio, not replacements? I’m not sure I did, so I’ll repeat it… UCS customers now have three Fabric Interconnects, two chassis I/O modules, two Virtual Interface Cards, and multiple traditional network adapters to choose from – and they’re all interoperable.

In addition to the new fabric devices, the soon-to-be-released UCS 2.0 firmware adds several features for existing and future UCS customers: Support for disjoint Layer 2 networks, UCS Service Profile support for iSCSI boot, and support for VM-FEX on RedHat KVM.

Read more…

May 25^th, 2011

If Charles Dickens were to write a book about it, it would begin like this:

“It was the best of predictions, it was the worst of predictions, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief from a new comer, it was the epoch of incredulity from an incumbent…”

Read more…

May 17^th, 2011

Recently, a couple of Twitter pals of mine, @veverything and @ChrisFendya, discussed VMware KB article 1013094 that stated an unsupported teaming type for the Cisco UCS B200 blade server. Their discussion made me realize that there wasn’t an easy-to-find resource for Cisco UCS customers that needed to know “OS Team Types Supported Per UCS Network Adapter” and “Unsupported Team Types”.

Below you will find both of these resources. I’ve listed a chart per Cisco UCS B-Series Network Adapter that shows the teaming/bonding types that will work per Operating System. Lastly, you’ll find a chart showing the team types that will not work.

Read more…

I love a box of chocolates for one simple reason – it provides a variety of bite-sized samples.  I get to taste several small samples and quickly determine which ones interest me and which ones don’t.  Well, why not package technical product discussions the same way?  I mean, why not provide several time-sized sample discussions of the technical advantages of a product or solution and let the consumer quickly determine which ones interest them or not?

Allow me to introduce you to the first round of the “Cisco UCS Advantage Series”…or, as I refer to it, a box of UCS chocolates.  This series was developed by Cisco to give our customers a quick sampling of just a few of the technical advantages of Cisco’s Unified Computing System solution.  Go on…sample a few.  They’re low calorie.

Read more…

December 20^th, 2010

Santa came early this year for Cisco UCS customers. Today, Cisco released UCS firmware version 1.4(1).  This release is the single most impressive feature enhancement release I’ve seen in all my 11 years of working on blade servers.  Allow me to walk you through this list of new features and provide a deeper dive into some of the details behind each one.

Note: The Release Notes are posted here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/OL_24086.html

Read more…

Oct. 26, 2010

“Products looking for customers” are very similar to “people looking for jobs” – the need for references that vouch for promised capabilities is a must. One or two people saying you can walk on water or turn water into wine probably won’t convince anyone that you told the truth on your resume. However, show up with 50+ quotable references from respectable sources and your prospective employer realizes you’re the real deal.

Well, Cisco’s entry into the server market is the real deal and you can believe everything on Cisco’s server resume. Just for starters, here are just 50 or so references from respectable sources that I’ve come across recently. Unfortunately, I can only list references with public statements regarding their UCS experiences. In other words, this list is just the tip of the iceberg of UCS deployments.

Read more…

2011-05-06 Update: B230 M2 Information Added
2010-09-20 Update: B230 Benchmark Achievements Added

As the fairy tale goes, Goldilocks thought the chairs were either too big or too small. Unfortunately, she could have also been describing many blade servers out there today – they’re either too big (taking up too many expensive blade chassis/mini-rack slots) or they’re too small (providing too little memory). In a direct response to this problem, Cisco has developed the first blade server that isn’t too big or too small, but “just right”…

On Tuesday, September 14th Cisco announced the 13th server in the UCS server portfolio – the Cisco UCS B230 M1. This innovative blade has a unique form factor and memory density relative to the rest of the industry. This is a breakthrough form factor that offers the highest memory density and up to 16 cores in a single slot blade. A 6U blade chassis can now hold up to 256 DIMMs and 128 cores. This means you can put more blades, more memory, and more cores in a smaller space, reducing costs and complexity.

Read more…

Sept. 13th, 2010

While reading a very informative blog post by Aaron Delp regarding VMware’s new NetIOC capability, I realized that Cisco and VMware are on the same page when it comes to server network traffic control. VMware’s NetIOC best practices plainly state exactly what Cisco has been advocating for so long – the user should plan for network contention but should not needlessly limit bandwidth in the absence of contention. 

VMware’s NetIOC Best Practices states the following:   Read more…

Sept. 12th, 2010

Here’s a quick overview of the server network adapter options for Cisco’s UCS B-Series blade servers.

Cisco has three classes of adapters: Read more…

Aug. 26th, 2010

Now in our second year of shipping Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, it seems that most of our 1700+ UCS customers are migrating to Cisco blades from HP blades. Two teammates of mine, Jeff Allen (Twitter) and Doron Chosnek (Twitter), have developed a process to help these customers migrate from HP blade servers to Cisco UCS blade servers in a matter of minutes. Their migration process, based on publicly available documentation from HP and Cisco, allows a UCS customer to move the “server identity” of the retired HP blade server to the newly deployed Cisco UCS blade server. For a discussion of what the “server identity” is, see this previous blog entitled “The State of Statelessness: Cisco UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect“.         

July 23rd, 2010

I have a very convoluted family background – from being a long, lost relative of the late Marie Antoinette to being an ashamed relative of a modern day actor that can’t seem to stay out of jail.  Somewhere in between, I have a whole slew of relatives with the last name of “Wagonseller”.  As you may have guessed, they sold wagons and buggies powered by horses.  I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a “Wagonseller” during the years after October 1, 1908 – the day the Ford Model T was introduced.  I can just imagine all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) my long lost family members were probably spouting as a result of having to compete with Ford’s entrance into the transportation industry in North America with a product that was destined to be a market changer.

Well, an article recently published by one of Cisco’s competitors (http://h20338.www2.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/messaging/realstory-cisco-datacenter-view.html) made me think of my family, the Wagonsellers.  As I was reading the article, I kept laughing out loud because I could just picture the Wagonsellers writing a similar article out of fear of the newly released automobile. Their article would have just enough truth mixed in with the FUD to make it sound legitimate but, ultimately, it would argue points that are either based on non-shipping products or argue points that are completely irrelevant to a new architecture design. To help you understand what I mean in regards to “just enough truth to make it sound legitimate”, I’ve written the article below in memory of my long, lost relatives, the Wagonsellers.

Read more…

I’ve got two questions for you…

Read more…

A server’s identity is made up of a collection of configuration settings on the server hardware, as well as, the configuration settings on the network and storage devices that it’s connected to.

As an example, see Figure 1. This server’s identity is made up of its RAID settings, disk scrub settings, number of HBAs, HBA WWNs, FC boot parameters, HBA firmware, FC fabric assignments, QoS settings, NIC speed, VLAN assignments, number of NICs, NIC firmware, remote keyboard/video/monitor IP address, server UUID, boot order, IPMI settings, BIOS firmware, BIOS settings, etc. I think you get the idea. It’s a LONG list of “points of configuration” that need to be configured to give this server its identity and make it unique from every other server within your data center.

Read more…