1. Unified Computing System (UCS) 2.0 - New Hardware & Software Features
Matthew Wronkowski – Escalation Engineer
Jose Martinez – Escalation Engineer
© 2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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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
TWO PRESENTERS SLIDE TEMPLATE
OPTIONAL for video webcast 2

3. Thank You for Joining Us Today
Today’s presentation will include audience polling questions
We encourage you to participate!
Applies to ON24 webcast console

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 center/unified-computing Or,
Applies to ON24 webcast console

5. Polling Question 1
What Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) software are you currently using?
UCSM 2.0(1)
UCSM 1.4(1) or 1.4(3)
UCSM 1.3(1)
Don’t have a UCS system at this time
Other release

6. Submit Your Questions Now
Use the Q&A panel to submit your questions. Experts will start responding those

7. Unified Computing System (UCS) 2.0 - New Hardware & Software Features
Matthew Wronkowski – Escalation Engineer
Jose Martinez – Escalation Engineer
© 2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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8. Agenda UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
UCS 6248 Fabric Interconnect
UCS 2208XP I/OM
Port-channel support
VIC 1280 adapter
UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
iSCSI boot support
Disjointed L2 support
VMDirectPath with vMotion
RedHat KVM with VM-FEX
HDD Health Status
© 2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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9. UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect

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)

11. UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnect
Power Entry
Fan Module
Out of Band Mgmt
10/100/1000
Console
Fabric Interconnect
Cluster 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)

12. UCS 6248UP Unified Ports 1/10GbE, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS 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

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

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!

15. UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS 2208XP I/OM

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

17. UCS 2208XP I/OM Throughput Increase
1st Generation
2nd Generation
2208XP
80 Gig
Per fabric

18. UCS 2208XP I/OM Discrete Mode
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

19. UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
Port-Channel Support

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

21. Chassis Discovery Policies
Global Discovery Policy
Per-Chassis Policy

22. UCS I/OM Mode Comparison
4 LINKS, DISCREET
8 LINKS, DISCREET
8 LINKS, PORT-CHANNEL
slot 1 F E X
slot 1
slot 2 F E X F E X
slot 2
slot 3
Fabric Interconnect
slot 3
Fabric Interconnect
Fabric Interconnect
slot 4
slot 5
slot 4
slot 5
slot 6
slot 7
slot 6
slot 7
slot 8
slot 8
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)
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.

23. UCS 2.0 Hardware Introduction
UCS VIC1280

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

25. UCS VIC 1280 Fabric Interconnects 2208 IOM 2208 IOM UCS Blade Server
(user configurable)
2208 IOM
2208 IOM
Adaptor Links PC
(system configured)
UCS Blade Server
VIC 1280

26. UCS VIC 1280 No slot based pinning
Port-Channel to Port-Channel pinning
No Invalid Link Count
VIC 1280 adaptor with DCE links in Port Channel
IOM 2208
Pinned to PC
Regular adaptor with single 10G link

27. New Hardware Compatibility
Fabric Interconnect
IOM
Adapter
Connectivity benefits per side
6100
2104
UCS M81 KR
Fabric and host connectivity same as Balboa 1.4(1)
2208
All 8 IOM ports in discrete mode
10 Gb to the host
UCS1280 VIC
4 IOM ports in discrete mode
5 Gb to the host
40 Gb to the host
6200
All 8 IOM ports can be leveraged in Port-channel mode

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

29. VIF Allocation Scheme Generation 1 Generation 2
Max no. of user vifs (vnics+vhbas) available to a slot (adaptor) = (15*n) – 2
n = no. of acknowledged iom uplinks
Generation 2
Max no. of user vifs (vnics+vhbas) available to a slot (adaptor) = (63*n) – 2
n = no. of acknowledged iom uplinks

30. Polling Question 2 Have you deployed new hardware in your environment?
Yes, UCS 6248 FI
Yes, UCS 2208XP I/OM
Yes, UCS 6248 FI and UCS 2208XP I/OM
Not yet

31. Submit Your Questions Now
Use the Q&A panel to submit your questions. Experts will start responding those

32. UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
iSCSI Boot Support

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 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

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.

35. iSCSI Adapter Policy Broadcom VIC
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

36. UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
Disjointed L2 Support

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

38. Disjointed L2 Support FI-A FI-B FI-A FI-B UCS pre-2.x UCS 2.x
Network 1
VLAN 10,20,31,32
FI-A
BIF 1
BIF 2
BIF 3
FI-B
UCS 2.x
Network 1
VLAN 10,20
BIF 1
BIF 2
BIF 3
Network 2
VLAN 31,32
Network 3
VLAN 11,12
FI-A
FI-B

39. UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
VMDirectPath with vMotion

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

41. Modes of VM-FEX Standard Mode vEth High Performance Mode (UPT) vEth
vSphere
Standard Mode
vEth
vNIC
vNIC
High Performance Mode (UPT)
vSphere
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

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.

43. UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
RedHat KVM with VM-Fex

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

45. RedHat KVM with VM-Fex … … … … KVM Guest 1 Guest 2 Management Tools
Application
Application
Management
Tools
Port Profile1: Qos1, vlan1
Guest OS
Guest OS
User
Libvirt
Port Profile2: Qos2, vlan2
virtio-net
virtio-net
Netlink
Socket
vhost-net
vhost-net
Macvtap Interface
Kernel
Macvtap 1
Macvtap 2 … …
Netdev Interface
eth0
eth1
eth2
ethn … … PF
VF1
VF2
VFn
Cisco VIC
Adapter Port
Switch Port
Veth 1
Veth 2
Port Profile1: Qos1, vlan1
UCS Switch
Port Profile2: Qos2, vlan2

46. UCS 2.0 Software Introduction
HDD Health Status

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

48. References Cisco Support Community https://supportforums.cisco.com/
Unified Computing System Community center/unified-computing
Cisco.com pages
Support pages: upport_series_home.html
Designing Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centers rtualization/securecldg.html

49. Books
Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
I/O Consolidation in the Data Center
Network Virtualization
Data Center Fundamentals

50. Recommended Reading
For Your
Reference 50

51. Polling Question 3
Are you currently doing stateless boot with Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI)?
Yes
No, I am using Fibre Channel
No, but planning to migrate
No, I have no plans of migrating

52. Q&A 52

53. We Appreciate Your Feedback!
We will raffle five gift certificates among those who fill out the Evaluation Survey
$20 USD Gift Certificate
To complete the evaluation, please click on link provided in the chat or after closing your browser.

54. 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.
You can watch the video or read the Q&A 5 business days after the event at
© 2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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55. Next CSC Expert Series Webcast in Portuguese
Topic: Cisco IronPort Security Technology
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 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: or directly at NGUAGE_ID=P&PRIORITY_CODE=4&SEMINAR_CODE=S15938

56. Next CSC Expert Series Webcast in Polish
Topic:  Wireless Transmission Optimization Technologies Available at Cisco Devices
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

57. We invite you to actively collaborate in the Cisco Support Community and social media

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 
Portuguese: 
Japanese 
Polish 
We’re also running a pilot for Russian You can register at the following link:
Russian: (Launching in March, 2012)

59. Thank You for Your Time
Please Take a Moment to Complete the Evaluation
© 2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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