Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC)

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.

One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.

After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better . I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).

Keyfeatures

Web based front-end
KVM and Virtual media
Change BIOS Settings
Active Directory connector
SNMP
IPMI (Very interesting with the Bare-metal deployment in SCVMM 2012)
SSH
Health Monitoring

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Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Hardware

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Today my two new virtualization nodes from Cisco arrived. For my Microsoft Hyper-V lab I needed two new nodes and I got a really good offering for two Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Servers.

The whole Cisco server series is optimized for virtualization and offers very cool features like a buildiin Cisco Integrated Management Controller (without extra charge) and Ciscos Extended Memory Technology which allows to use up to 192GB RAM.

Technical Specs

The Cisco UCS C200 M2 server is a high-density, 2-socket, 1 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server built for production-level network infrastructure, web services, and mainstream data center, branch, and remote-office applications.

Up to two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 Series multicore processors
Up to 192GB of industry-standard double data rate (DDR3) main memory
Up to eight 2.5-inch or four 3.5-inch internal SAS or SATA disk drives; up to 8 terabytes (TB) total
Built-in RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SATA drives; RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SAS or SATA drives with optional mezzanine card; and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 support for four SAS or SATA drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 support for eight SAS or SATA drives with optional LSI MegaRAID card
Two half length Gen 2 PCIe slots-one full height x16 and one low profile x8 PCI Express-two integrated Gb Ethernet ports, and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet management port for accessing the controller
Front- and back-panel interface with video, two USB, and serial port connections

More Information on Cisco.com

Hardware

The Hardware makes a really good first impression.

One of my next posts will be about the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) which I really started to like.

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!

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Enhancements

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

I could test some features in the new version of Hyper-V which comes with the Windows Server 8 Developer Preview. I did a little overview about the a lot of new features in the new Hyper-V Version: Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”. In this post I will write something about some new things in Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.

Windows Server 8 Developer Preview Hyper-V Memory Settings:

New maximum memory of a Virtual Machine is 512GB
You can now change the Dynamic Memory Settings during the VM is running. You don’t need to reboot.
You have now three values you can use, Startup RAM, Minimum RAM, Maximum RAM. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 you could only setup Startup and Maximum RAM.
You can now active Dynamic Memory during the creation of the new Virtual Machine

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Memory Settings:

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Network Bandwidth Management

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

With the new version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 8 Developer Preview you can now manage the Network Bandwidth with a Maximum and a Minimum value.

This allows you to create some SLAs for hosted Virtual Machines.

For example this is a possible scenario:

There are a lot of other networking improvments in Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3. You can get some of them in my little Overview about new features in Windows Server 8 Hyper-V: Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”.

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Virtual Machine Replication

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

One of the biggest new features in Windows Server 8 Hyper-V is Hyper-V Replica. Hyper-V Replica allows you to replicate Virtual Machines over the network to another Hyper-V Hosts. This is great if you replicate the VM to another datacenter or if you don’t want to create a Hyper-V Cluster and still have the requirement to start the Virtual Machine in 30 minutes on another host.

With the Hyper-V VM Move feature you can even push this and live migrate a Virtual Machine to another host even if you don’t have a cluster. This can be useful if you have a maintenance window on your Hyper-V hosts.