Updates to the Cisco UCS

Cisco has released some updates for the Cisco Unified Computing System, both in the form of hardware and software.  The new Fabric Interconnects are the 6248s, replacing the 6120s and 6140s. At just 1U, they provide 48 ports of connectivity with the 16 port expansion module; each of these ports are unified, meaning they are configurable for TenGigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel over Ethernet.  Each of the ports in the 16 port expansion module can be configured for TenGigabit Ethernet, FCoE or Fibre Channel.  Other updates in the 6248s include support for 4096 VLANs (over 1024) and 80Gbps half-width blade connectivity (over 20Gbps).  Future enhancements to the 6248s will be a Layer 3 daughter card and support for FabricPath.  More details to come on those…

Updates to the IO Modules, the 2208XP now have eight 10GigabitEthernet ports instead of four.  This is the trick to providing 80 Gbps connectivity to each IO Module, 160Gbps connectivity per chassis (when utilizing 16 uplinks per chassis).  This also quadruples the server bandwidth from 20Gbps (10Gbps on each IOM) to 80Gbps (40Gbps on each IOM)!  Cisco has also released the second generation Virtual Interface Card, called the 1280.  This VIC supports 40Gbps connectivity per slot and scales up the number of VM interfaces (with ESXi 5.0).  There are no updates to the 5108 chassis, but that’s the beauty of modular design.  You only need to replace the Fabric Interconnects, IO Modules and mezzanine cards to take advantage of these benefits — chassis and blades (apart from mezzanines) stay the same!

In order to support this new hardware, Cisco has released firmware version 2.0(1).  This firmware also provides some additional features, such as iSCSI boot and VM-FEX integration with Red Hat Linux.  Here are the other features included in 2.0(1):

• Licensing – Updated information for new UCS hardware.
• Firmware Bundle Option – Enables you to select a bundle instead of a version when updating firmware using the Cisco UCS Manager GUI.
• Disk Drive Monitoring Support – Support for disk drive monitoring on certain blade servers and a specific LSI storage controller firmware level.
• iSCSI Boot – iSCSI boot enables a server to boot its operating system from an iSCSI target machine located remotely over a network.
• Pre-login Banner – Displays user-defined banner text prior to login when a user logs into Cisco UCS Manager using the GUI or CLI.
• Unified Ports – Unified ports are ports on the 6200 series fabric interconnect that can be configured to carry either Ethernet or Fibre Channel traffic.
• Upstream Disjoint Layer-2 Networks – Enables you to configure Cisco UCS to communicate with upstream disjoint layer-2 networks.
• Virtual Interfaces – The number of vNICs and vHBAs configurable for a service profile is determined by adapter capability and the amount of virtual interface (VIF) namespace available on the adapter.
• VM-FEX Integration for VMware – Cisco Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) for VMware provides management integration and network communication between Cisco UCS Manager and VMware vCenter. In previous releases, this functionality was known as VN-Link in Hardware.
• VM-FEX Integration for KVM (Red Hat Linux) – Cisco Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) for VMware provides external switching for virtual machines running on a KVM Linux-based hypervisor in a Cisco UCS instance.

That’s about it as far as updates go.  Check out M. Sean McGee’s blog post for even more detail.  And if you’re wondering how hard it is to upgrade your environment, not hard at all; check out Cisco’s walkthrough to replacing your Fabric Interconnects and IO Modules with minimum downtime.

Thanks for reading.

- Andrew

Sources:

Cisco 6248UP Overview

Cisco 6200 Data Sheet

Firmware 2.0(1) Release Notes