UCS Mythbusters

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In this clip from episode 100,Jimmy Ray and guest Jeff Silberman address the myths being portrayed by Cisco’s competitors, and demonstrates why it just doesn’t hold water. A must-see segment for you competitive types!

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Hyper-V Networks – Part 5

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This How-To shows you how you configure the (Virtual) Network Adapters of the Hyper-V Servers. This is not really heavy, but to complete the UCS Hyper-V Guide I post this. If you use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 you will find later a post about doing this in SCVMM 2008 R2.

Connect to the Hyper-V Server with the Hyper-V Manager Console
Now you can configure the Networks under Virtual Network Manager on each Hyper-V Host.
What we did is, we added 7 (Virtual) Network adapters to the UCS Bladenodes in the UCS Manager. We added the same on Configuration on the Blades which are using VMware ESXi and on the Blades with Microsoft Hyper-V and thats why we have a Network called vMotion on the Hyper-V Servers. We use the vMotion network adpater for the private Failover Cluster Heartbeat.

Basically we have the following Networks:

1. Network adapter is the Hyper-V Management Network dedicated to the Hyper-V Node
2. Network adpater for Hyper-V Cluster Live Migration
3. Network adapter for private Failover Cluster Heartbeat
4. Network adapter External Network, is used for our main external Network
5. Network adapter Internal Network, is used for our internal Management Network for Servers
6. and 7. Network adapters are used for VLAN Trunks

To get the best performance we don’t share any Network Adapter with the Hyper-V Host and a Virtual Network.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Install Blade Servers – Part 3

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After you have created a new Hyper-V 2008 R2 ISO Installation image you can now start to install the Cisco Blade Servers. There are many ways (WDS, Virtual Media) how you can deploy the Hyper-V Image on your Blade Nodes. I will use the Virtual Media to install the Blade Notes in this guide.

Start the KVM Console in the UCS Manager
Attach the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Image to the Virtual Media
Now do the standard Hyper-V installation. With the Image we created Hyper-V will have all the drivers you need.
After the Installation is finished and you set the local administrator password. I change the IP Address of the Server and install the latest updates.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Image for Blade Servers – Part 2

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

We use Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as Operating System for our Cisco Blade Notes. The Cisco UCS does need some special drivers which are not included in Hyper-V Server Image (Network and HBA). So I created a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 ISO file which includes the Drivers from the Cisco UCS.

I made a blog post about adding Drivers to a Windows ISO, this is pretty much the same.

First Download the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 ISO from microsoft.com
Download the Drivers from Cicso.com, you can download the Bundle File which also includes firmware.
Download and install the Windows Automated Installation Kit
Extract the Hyper-V ISO to C:\temp\hypervr2
Extract the Windows Driver folder in the Cisco Driver ISO (In my case ucs-b2xx-drivers-1.3.1g.iso) to C:\temp\Drivers\Windows
Create a folder for the WIM mount point C:\temp\WIM
Start Windows AIK Deployment Tools Command Prompt from Start menu
Now mount the install.wim file form the original Hyper-V Image (C:\temp\hypervr2\SOURCES) to C:\temp\WIM
```
imagex /mountrw C:\temp\hypervr2\SOURCES\install.wim 1 C:\temp\wim
```

Add Drivers with dism

CD C:\temp\Drivers\Windows\Network\Emulex\M72KR\W2K8R2\x64
dism /image:C:\temp\WIM /add-driver /driver:. /recurse

After adding all drivers to the Image you can unmout the WIM Image
```
imagex /unmount /commit C:\temp\wim
```

Now create the new ISO file

oscdimg -n -m -bc:\temp\hypervr2\boot\etfsboot.com C:\temp\hypervr2 C:\temp\hypervr2drivers.iso

Now you can use this new Image to deploy the Hyper-V Hosts on your Cisco UCS Blades.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Part1

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This is my first post on a Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster with a Cisco UCS. In the next parts I will write about how to setup a Hyper-V Cluster on a UCS.

After testing and evaluation Bladecenters for our Datacenter, we decided that the Cisco UCS is the best solution for us. There are a lot of reasons why the UCS (Cisco Unified Computing System) is one of the best systems for a datacenter. Some of them are:

Easy cabling
Single Management Console for Switches, Chassies and Blades (UCS Manager)
Hardware Virtualization
Made for Datacenters

About the Cisco UCS (Wikipedia):

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center computing solution composed of computing hardware, virtualization software, switching fabric, and management software. The idea behind the system is to reduce total cost of ownership and improve scalability by integrating the different components into a cohesive platform that can be managed as a single unit. Just-In-Time deployment of resources and 1:N redundancy are also possible with a system of this type.

But lets start with our project. First of all what have we got in our starting configuration.

Two chassies with 6 Blade Servers each
12 Blade Servers (2x Intel Xeon 6-cores and 72GB RAM)
6 Nodes for VMware and 6 Nodes for Hyper-V
EMC Storage

In the next part I will write about how to Setup the Blade Servers with Microsoft Hyper-V Server (Core).