Section #3 Basic Knowledge of Cloud Compute

1. Identify key features of Cisco UCS

UCS Manager

• A unified embedded management interface that integrates server, network, and storage access
•  Policy and model-based management, with service profiles, that improves agility and reduces risk
• Auto-discovery to detect, inventory, manage, and provision system components that are added or changed
• A comprehensive open XML API, which facilitates integration with third-party systems management tools
• Role-based administration that builds on existing skills and supports collaboration across disciplines

Cisco UCS Central 

Simplify Operations at Scale

Cisco UCS Central software manages multiple, globally distributed Cisco UCS domains with thousands of servers from a single pane. It can simplify global policy compliance. Using SingleConnect Technology, Cisco UCS provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components with the Cisco UCS Manager. Every instance of Cisco UCS Manager and all of the components managed by it form a domain. Cisco UCS Central integrates with Cisco UCS Manager, and utilizes it to provide global configuration capabilities for pools, policies, and firmware.

Increase Global Visibility and Control

Cisco UCS Central aggregates inventory and fault information across multiple Cisco UCS domains to facilitate service assurance for the Cisco UCS infrastructure. Like Cisco UCS Manager, it exposes an XML API for integration with customer and partner management solutions.

Provide Flexibility

Cisco UCS Central software does not replace Cisco UCS Manager, which is the basic engine for server management in individual Cisco UCS domains. Unlike Cisco UCS Manager, which is embedded in the Fabric Interconnects, Cisco UCS Central is a virtual machine image that can be run on a hypervisor to provide powerful compute infrastructure management.

Cisco UCS Central can provide global definition capabilities for policies and resource pools which can be flexibly allocated across distributed data centers. This enables administrators to follow a “define once, deploy many times” workflow for their compute infrastructure.

B-Series

Connectivity from a B-Series chassis to the Fabric Interconnects:

• The Cisco UCS 2204XP Fabric Extender (Figure 4) has four 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, SFP+ ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2204XP has sixteen 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 80 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.
• The Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extender (Figure 3) has eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2208XP has thirty-two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 160 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.

Enterprise-Critical

The Cisco UCS B460 M4 Blade Server provides industry-leading performance and enterprise-critical stability for memory-intensive workloads such as:

• Large-scale databases
• In-memory analytics
• Business intelligence

For memory-intensive workloads such as database, virtualization, and consolidation applications, the Cisco UCS B260 M4 Blade Server delivers superior performance and stability.

The Cisco UCS B260 M4 Blade Server offers the performance and reliability of the Intel Xeon E7 v3 processor product family. And with up to 48 dual in-line memory module slots, this combination:

• Increases capacity for virtualization and data-set workloads with up to 3 TB of memory
• Improves virtualization performance and helps enable more virtual machines per server
• Reduces CPU core and software license costs
• Increases performance on memory-intensive workloads

The 4-socket Cisco UCS B460 M4 High-Performance Blade Server offers new levels of scalability, performance, and reliability. The B460 M4 server is powered by the scalable performance and reliability of the Intel Xeon E7 v3 processor product family. It is designed to meet the needs of computing-intensive and memory-intensive enterprise-critical applications.

Enterprise-Class

For remote sites or data centers, the enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Server delivers market-leading performance, versatility, and density. This system is ideal for workloads ranging from web infrastructure to a distributed database.

The Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server addresses the broadest set of workloads, from IT and web infrastructure to a distributed database. You get performance, versatility, and density without compromise.

Designed for performance and scalability in a dense blade form-factor, the Cisco UCS B420 M4 Blade Server supports the latest 4-socket Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v3 family. UCS B420 M4 combines a large memory footprint with four-socket scalability, to support demanding database and large virtualization workloads

Scale-Out Capable

The Cisco UCS B22 M3 Blade Server feature set offers superior price and performance. You can address a range of requirements, from IT infrastructure to Web 2.0 applications.

C-Series

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers provide the following benefits:

• Form-factor-agnostic entry point into Cisco UCS
• Simplified and fast deployment of applications
• Extension of unified computing innovations and benefits to rack servers
• Inc
• Erased customer choice with unique benefits in a familiar rack package Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase in business agility

Enterprise-Critical

Cisco UCS C460 M4 Mission-Critical Rack Server

This superior-performance rack server is a four-socket, four-rack unit (4RU) system designed for the most demanding enterprise and mission-critical workloads, large-scale virtualization, and database applications.

Cisco UCS C460 M2 High Performance Rack Server

This high-performance rack server is a four-socket, four-rack unit (4RU), enterprise-critical server for data-demanding applications and bare-metal and virtualized workloads.

Cisco UCS C260 M2 Rack Server

This industry-leading, high-density, expandable two-socket, two-rack unit (2RU) server manages enterprise-critical workloads, including storage serving, online transaction processing, and data warehousing.

Enterprise-Class

Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Server

This storage and I/O-optimized, two-rack-unit (2RU) server delivers industry-leading performance for the most data-intensive enterprise workloads. That includes big data analytics, virtualization, and bare metal applications.

Cisco UCS C220 M4 Rack Server

This storage and I/O-optimized, one-rack-unit (1RU) server delivers industry-leading performance for the most data-intensive enterprise workloads that includes big data analytics, virtualization, and bare metal applications.

Cisco UCS C420 M3 Rack Server

This is a high-density, four-socket, two-rack-unit (2RU) enterprise-class rack server is designed for computing, I/O, storage, and memory-intensive standalone and virtualized applications.

Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server

This 2RU server is designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration.

Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server

This one-rack unit (1RU) server offers superior performance and density over a wide range of business workloads, from web serving to distributed database.

Scale-Out

Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server

A highly scalable, modular rack server with high storage density targeted at environments deploying OpenStack, Ceph-based object stores, and other software-defined and distributed storage environments.

Cisco UCS C24 M3 Rack Server

This 2RU, 2-socket rack server is designed for both outstanding economics and internal expandability over a range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from IT and web infrastructure to big data.

Cisco UCS C22 M3 Rack Server

This 1RU, 2-socket rack server design combines outstanding economics and a density-optimized feature set over a range of scale-out workloads, from IT and web infrastructure to distributed applications.

Server identity (profiles, templates, pools)

Profiles
Conceptually, a service profile is an extension of the virtual machine abstraction applied to physical servers. The definition has been expanded to include elements of the environment that span the entire data center, encapsulating the server identity (LAN and SAN addressing, I/O configurations, firmware versions, boot order, network VLAN, physical port, and quality-of-service [QoS] policies) in logical “service profiles” that can be dynamically created and associated with any physical server in the system within minutes rather than hours or days. The association of service profiles with physical servers is performed as a simple, single operation. It enables migration of identities between servers in the environment without requiring any physical configuration changes and facilitates rapid bare-metal provisioning of replacements for failed servers.

Service profiles also include operational policy information, such as information about firmware versions.

This highly dynamic environment can be adapted to meet rapidly changing needs in today’s data centers with just-in-time deployment of new computing resources and reliable movement of traditional and virtual workloads. Data center administrators can now focus on addressing business policies and data access on the basis of application and service requirements, rather than physical server connectivity and configurations.

Service profiles can be abstracted from the specifics of a given server to create a service profile template, which defines policies that can be applied any number of times to provision any number of servers. Service profile templates help enable large-scale operations in which many servers are provisioned as easily as a single server.
In addition, using service profiles, Cisco UCS Manager provides logical grouping capabilities for both physical servers and service profiles and their associated templates. This pooling or grouping, combined with fine-grained role-based access, allows businesses to treat a farm of compute blades as a flexible resource pool that can be reallocated in real time to meet their changing needs, while maintaining any organizational overlay on the environment that they want. Figure 2 shows the major elements of a service profile.

Templates
The real power of the service profile becomes evident in templates. A service profile template parameterizes the UIDs that differentiate one instance of an otherwise identical server from another. Templates can be categorized into two types: initial and updating.

• Initial Template: The initial template is used to create a new server from a service profile with UIDs, but after the server is deployed, there is no linkage between the server and the template, so changes to the template will not propagate to the server, and all changes to items defined by the template must be made individually to each server deployed with the initial template.
• Updating Template: An updating template maintains a link between the template and the deployed servers, and changes to the template (most likely to be firmware revisions) cascade to the servers deployed with that template on a schedule determined by the administrator.

Service profiles, templates, and other management data is stored in high-speed persistent storage on the Cisco Unified Computing System fabric interconnects, with mirroring between fault-tolerant pairs of fabric interconnects.
Pools
It was typical to use the derived values (burned-in values) for UUID and adapter identities when you deployed (installed, booted, or accessed) the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Blade with the Rack-Mounted (traditional server) paradigm. In the full Logical Server paradigm deployment, you need to have identities defined with the logical service profile that will then be applied to the Cisco UCS blade. A Logical Server is defined with identity (UUID, MAC/WWN addresses, and VLAN/VSAN requirements). The profile can be associated with only one blade at a time, but the association can be changed if there is a problem with a particular blade, or hardware maintenance is required on a particular blade.

The Mobile (Relocatable) Logical Server concept allows the same logical server to be booted on different blades at different times. When a blade is associated with a server profile, it inherits all its identity and boot information from the profile. This model works best when the OS is booted off a SAN LUN. This document shows you how to create pools of identity information defined within the Logical Server Profile to facilitate the Mobile Logical Server concept:

• Create UUID Pools
• Create MAC Pools
• Create WWN Pools

Once these pools are created, it simplifies blade management within the Cisco UCS environment.
The Cisco UCS leverages itself to a model where server farms can be easily allocated and deployed, without the need to pre-associate specific hardware to specific server roles. Server pools lend themselves to the server farm model. Note that you still need a separate logical server profile for each server that is booted simultaneously. If you want to deploy a farm of 50 web servers, you need 50 separate (but hopefully very similar) profiles. This Server Pool feature facilitates easy deployment of the sever farm model within the Cisco UCS. This document shows you how to create Server Pools that provide a method to use multiple logical server profiles to create servers in a farm.

2. Basic knowledge of different OS and hypervisors

Cisco UCS supports several hypervisors including VMware ESX, ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and others

Types of Hypervisors:

• Type 1 (Native or Bare-metal hypervisors) – These hypervisors run directly on the host’s hardware to control the hardware and to manage guest operating systems
• Type 2 (Hosted Hypervisors) – These hypervisors run on a conventional operating system just as other computer programs do. Type-2 hypervisors abstract guest operating systems from the host operating system.

Virtual Machine Management:

• VMware
  • vSphere Client (single host)
  • vCenter (multiple hosts, additional features)
• Microsoft
  • Hyper-V Manager
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager (multiple hosts, additional features)
• Linux
  • CLI, GUI (single host)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, OpenStack Nova, etc. (multiple hosts, additional features)

Virtualization Cluster Feature:

• High Availability – failover protection against hardware and operating system failure by automatically restarting a VM on a separate physical host if a failure is detected.
• Load Balancing – the monitoring of a VM resource utilization and when contention arises moving the VM to a separate physical host with more resources available
• Fault Tolerance – provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is always up-to-date with the primary virtual machine

OpenStack – open source project for building private and public clouds that is comprised of multiple development projects

Major OpenStack Projects:

• Horizon (Dashboard)
• Nova (Compute)
• Glance (Image Service)
• Swift (Object Storage)
• Neutron (Networking)
• Cinder (Volumes)
• Heat (Orchestration)
• Ceilometer (Metrics)
• Keystone (Identify Services)