Server Virtualization

After 5 years in SAN storage industry with a virtualization focus, I recently shifted gears to just virtualization in the context of servers, storage, and infrastructure.  This has been an eye opening experience, the most enlightening part of this re-focus has been the incredible efforts that Cisco has put into the engineering of the Cisco UCS platform.  While on the surface the Cisco UCS B-Series looks like just another blade center server, never judge a book by its cover.

The Cisco UCS Platform moves the concept of virtualization to the actual hardware.  So where VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft provide products that abstract the physical hardware to allow greater utilization of server hardware, Cisco has extended the concept abstracting hardware to the actual physical servers or blades.  Physical hardware has UUID, MAC Addresses and WWNN/WWPN addresses burned into the hardware, this means the operating system will key in on these addresses for certain features.  While hypervisor’s hide this physical addressing from the Virtual Machines (VM), the hypervisor itself is tied to these addresses.  This means that you cannot simply upgrade a blade or server by simply replacing it with a newer version, even in a boot from SAN environment without some manual intervention.  Cisco UCS allows for these addresses to be virtual and applied to blade, meaning the addresses can actually be moved from one blade to another.  This accomplished through the use of Service Profiles that contain the configuration of the not only the addressing (UUID, MAC, and WWNN/WWPN) but also the firmware version, number of NICs, number of FC HBAs, bios settings (CPU settings, Memory settings, etc), and boot order.  The Cisco UCS and Data Center products (Nexus 2000/5000/7000, WAAS, ACE, etc) are moving towards a wire once model for all connectivity options (Ethernet, FC, FCoE, or iSCSI).  The means that once the Data Center is wired adding or changing connectivity options does not require the planning, expense and downtime to re-wire.

The combination of Cisco UCS and hypervisor brings virtualization to both hardware and software forming the a very formidable backbone for the next generation data center.  As many companies move towards greater levels of virtualization, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud to provide more services to end users having scalable and flexible hardware platform is just a key as having a hypervisor that it is scalable and flexible.

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