UCSguru

Product Update

ucsguru — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:21:40 +0000

UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect
If like me you do some quite large UCS designs, the 6296UP is a very welcome addition to the UCS product portfolio, often In designs consisting of 10 Chassis or more each requiring very high IO, I had to start to think about compromising the number of IO Module to Fabric Interconnect Links and having to use the slightly higher port count of the 6140 (with both expansion modules) over the 6248UP, those type of decisions should be gone when the 6296UP is shipping, as now I will be able to hit 20 Chassis (Maximum currently supported) using 4 IO module links. and still have 16 ports for SAN and LAN Uplinks. Can’t see any real immediate requirements to go to 8 x FI to IOM links with the 2208XP but I guess the option is there for real IO hungary workloads. Of course you have the option of a combination of setups depending on the workloads on a particular chassis, but my customers love the “just wire’em up to the MAX once and leave it” type setup and have the flexibilty of moving any workload anywhere without thinking about how much IO a particular chassis has available.

2204 IO Module
The new UCS Generation 2 2204 IO Module is (as its name would indicate) basically just a 2208 cut in half, i.e. 4 Network ports and 16 blade facing ports (2 x 10Gbs traces per server, per Fabric = 40Gbps per blade) this will be a good fit in situations which want a good performance/cost balance option, ustilising double the server traces of a 2104XP when used in conjuction with the VIC 1280.

All products should hopfully be shipping by March 2012

VM-FEX VMDirectPath Mode Configuration(2/2)

ucsguru — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:31:13 +0000

VM-FEX VMDirectPath Mode Configuration(1/2)

ucsguru — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:28:50 +0000

Cisco VM-FEX Emulated Mode Configuration Part 3/3

ucsguru — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:51:16 +0000

Cisco VM-FEX Emulated Mode Configuration Part 2/3

ucsguru — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:49:44 +0000

Cisco VM-FEX Emulated Mode Configuration Part 1/3

ucsguru — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:48:07 +0000

Cisco VM-FEX Introduction Part 2

ucsguru — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:06:51 +0000

Cisco VM-FEX Introduction Part 1

ucsguru — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:03:59 +0000

UCS Generation 2 Hardware and UCSM 2.0

ucsguru — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:10:41 +0000

vSphere 5 new licensing model.

ucsguru — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:26:03 +0000

Up until now Cisco along with other vendors have been hugely driving up memory capacity while maintaining low CPU counts, Cisco’s Extended memory technology certainly gave them the edge in this space, however with greater DDR3 DIMM sizes ( 16GB now supported across all half width UCS M2 models) this advantage is not the differentiator it once was, as other vendors and non EMT Cisco UCS blades have now caught up or in some cases surpassed their EMT counterparts. There is still a case to be made about higher clock rates for Nehalem/Westmere EP processors over Nehalem EX and EMT memory real estate allowing greater capacities to be reached with smaller DIMM sizes perhaps.

One of the major reasons that platforms are increasingly featuring high memory / low CPU-count configurations is that it played right into the sweet spot of VMware’s VSphere 4 licensing model, in which licenses are based on number of sockets and number of cores on those sockets. However the licensing model of VSphere 5 now puts additional licensing requirements on larger memory capacities. More specifically vSphere 5 licenses are based on “vRAM:” the total amount of memory dedicated to each virtual machine,

For example A dual socket server with 256GB of RAM would under the new licensing model roughly double the cost of your VMware licensing.

VMware’s customers were so outraged at this licensing change that this week VMware announced a revised model (as shown below) which does significantly lessen the blow by doubling the amount of “Pre Tax” memory for Enterprise and Enterprise + licensing models

Below is a comparison of the previously announced and the new vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements per vSphere edition:

while I do not think VMware intentionally targeted the UCS it has the potential to be a major factor in customers buying decisions.

I think while VMware is still clearly the market leader and the “Hypervisor of choice” for Cisco UCS and Enterprise servers in general for that matter, this new licensing model will I’m sure put additional focus on alternative Hypervisors primarily Microsofts Hyper V , RedHat KVM and Citrix XEN.

Interestingly enough while writing this my memory is now recalling that UCS 2.0 (Capitola) due September has added additional functionality around RedHat KVM (specifically VM-FEX support, which essentially replaces the hypervisor switch with hardware switching on the UCS Fabric interconnects). Did Cisco see this coming and have decided to switch hypervisor allegiances, who knows.

Interesting times.