Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Part1

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).