One of my most popular posts ever is perhaps Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD) posted last June (2010). So what do you do with a good thing? You figure out how to make it even better, right? Of course! On that note I am thrilled to present a new and improved 12 part [...]
Cisco UCS criticism and FUD: Answered
December 31, 2010 By 47 Comments
One of my readers recently submitted a comment asking me to respond to some criticisms he frequently hears about Cisco UCS. This is a pretty typical request I get from partners and perspective customers, and its a list of stuff I ‘ve seen many times before, so I thought it would be fun to address [...]
Cisco UCS Fabric Extender (FEX) QoS
December 8, 2010 By 9 Comments
Cisco Nexus 7000 connectivity solutions for Cisco UCS
December 1, 2010 By 10 Comments
Last summer I was invited by the Nexus 7000 product management team at Cisco to help co-author a whitepaper covering general guidelines and best practices for network integration of Cisco UCS with Cisco Nexus 7000. The idea was to take a lot of the content already presented in my video series Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #3 – flexible configuration
October 22, 2010 By 5 Comments
This is a follow-up question from the same reader Geoff who’s original question about traffic steering was discussed here. Geoff responded to my original answer by brining up my Folly in HP vs UCS Tolly article and doubting that Cisco UCS really has active/active fabrics. Follow-up Question: Hi Brad, thank you very much for your [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #2 – End Host Mode forwarding behavior
October 22, 2010 By 17 Comments
This question comes from a reader named Wei about how Cisco UCS behaves in End Host Mode with respect to MAC learning and flooding. Wei paints a scenario of two servers in the same VLAN, one inside Cisco UCS, the other outside of Cisco UCS. With the Fabric Interconnect in End Host Mode, what happens [...]
Cisco UCS Q&A #1 – traffic steering
October 20, 2010 By 1 Comment
This question about Cisco UCS traffic steering comes from a reader named Geoff: There is one aspect of UCS which I have been trying to understand and have not found a good explanation. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction and maybe if it is of general interest it might form the basis [...]
Cisco UCS Fabric Failover: Slam Dunk? or So What?
September 23, 2010 By 26 Comments
Fabric Failover is a unique capability found only in Cisco UCS that allows a server adapter to have a highly available connection to two redundant network switches without any NIC teaming drivers or any NIC failover configuration required in the OS, hypervisor, or virtual machine. In this article we will take a brief look at [...]
VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus
September 15, 2010 By 38 Comments
Last month I wrote a brief article discussing the intelligent QoS capabilities of Cisco UCS in a VMware 10GE scenario, accompanied by some flash animations for visual learners like me. In that article I (intentionally) didn’t get too specific with design details or technical nuance. Rather, I wanted to set the stage first with a [...]
Cisco UCS intelligent QoS vs. HP Virtual Connect rate limiting
August 16, 2010 By 26 Comments
This article is a simple examination of the fundamental differences in how server bandwidth is handled between the Cisco UCS approach of QoS (quality of service), and the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 / FlexFabric approach of Rate Limiting. I created two simple flash animations shown below to make the comparison. The animations above are each [...]
Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD)
June 22, 2010 By 46 Comments
UPDATE 3/8/2011: This video series has been obsoleted by a new and updated series posted here: Cisco UCS Networking videos (in HD), Updated & Improved! This is a presentation I developed covering networking best practices for Cisco UCS, and now have recorded in High Definition for your viewing pleasure! Sweet! This presentation assumes familiarity with [...]
The FOLLY in the HP vs Cisco UCS Tolly Group report on bandwidth
March 2, 2010 By 37 Comments
Folly: lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight Tolly Group: “Clients work with Tolly Group senior personnel to identify the chief marketing message desired” HP: Client of Tolly Group with a desired marketing message of “Cisco UCS bandwidth sucks”, but in fact received an embarrassing Folly. (refund?) By now you may have read [...]
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
August 11, 2009 By 44 Comments
This is a follow-up and enhancement of a previous design diagram in which I showed Cisco UCS running the standard VMware vSwitch. In this post I am once again showing Cisco UCS utilizing the Cisco (Palo) virtualized adapter with an implementation of VMware vSphere 4.0, however in this design we are running ESXi and the [...]
Cisco UCS and VMWare vSwitch design with Cisco 10GE Virtual Adapter
July 5, 2009 By 29 Comments
This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter. The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV). The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical [...]
Cisco UCS pricing response to Egenera
April 28, 2009 By 9 Comments
Egenera criticized Cisco’s math for UCS pricing in an article titled “A Closer Look at Cisco UCS pricing“. After reading the first few paragraphs of this article it became quite clear that Egenera needs a closer look at their own math. Let’s examine the flaws in the article… About the price of management software for [...]
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