Here I am in my Cisco UCS training class and I just booted up my first blade. Im writing this post from the Cisco Unified Computing System!

Wow was this easy. Here is what I did:

  • Logged in to the Cisco UCS Manager GUI.
  • Created a “Service Profile” where I defined various configuration settings such as the BIOS boot order, how many NICs, the MAC address and VLAN settings of the NICs, how many HBA’s, the firmware version of my system, firmware of my NICs, etc.
  • Applied my Service Profile to an available Blade
  • The Cisco UCS Manager provisioned my Blade with all the settings in my Service Profile.
  • I powered on my Blade from the Cisco UCS Manager GUI.
  • I launched a KVM console from the Cisco UCS Manager GUI, watched the blade boot up and load the OS (Windows)
  • Logged into Windows, loaded Firefox, wrote this post.

The cool thing was that my “server” is really a Service Profile that was applied to an available resource (an available Blade). The Cisco UCS Manager pre provisioned the available Blade before it even booted up.

The Service Profile I created can be easily removed from this Blade and applied to any other Blade in any other chassis attached to the system.

I can also create a resource pool of Blades and then apply my Service Profile to the resource pool. The Cisco UCS Manager will find an available Blade from the pool, provision it, and boot it up.

I can also create “Organizations” and assign resource pools to each organization.

My username I logged in with can be set up to have one or more defined roles (SAN, LAN, Server, Ops) and assigned administrative access to one or more of the organizations.

So from all of this it is quite clear that Cisco UCS is squarely set to deliver on the whole utility computing, cloud computing, resource virtualization model.

Fun!

Cheers,
Brad