High Availability
Themanagement and data plane of Cisco UCS isdesigned for high availabilityand redundant access layer
fabricinterconnects. In addition, Cisco UCS supports existing high availability and disaster recovery solutions
forthe datacenter, such as data replication and application-level clustering technologies.
Scalability
Asingle Cisco UCS domain supports multiple chassis and their servers, all of which areadministered through
oneCisco UCS Manager. For more detailed information about the scalability, speak to your Cisco representative.
Flexibility
ACisco UCS domain allows you to quickly align computing resources in the data center with rapidly changing
businessrequirements. This built-in flexibility is determined by whether you choose to fully implement the
statelesscomputing feature.
Poolsof servers and other system resources can be applied as necessary to respond to workload fluctuations,
supportnew applications, scale existing software and business services, and accommodate both scheduled
andunscheduled downtime. Server identity can be abstracted into a mobile service profile that can be moved
fromserver to serverwith minimal downtime and no need for additional network configuration.
Withthis level of flexibility, you can quickly and easily scale server capacity without having to change the
serveridentity or reconfigure the server, LAN, or SAN. During a maintenance window, you can quickly do
thefollowing:
• Deploy new servers to meet unexpected workload demand and rebalance resources and traffic.
• Shut down an application, such as a database management system, on one server and then boot it up
againon anotherserver withincreased I/O capacityand memory resources.
Optimized for Server Virtualization
CiscoUCS hasbeen optimizedto implement VM-FEX technology.This technology provides improved
supportfor servervirtualization, including better policy-based configuration andsecurity, conformance with
acompany's operational model, and accommodation for VMware's VMotion.
Unified Fabric
Withunified fabric, multiple types of data center traffic can run over a single Data Center Ethernet (DCE)
network.Instead of having a series of different host bus adapters (HBAs) and network interface cards (NICs)
presentin a server, unified fabric uses a single converged network adapter. This type of adapter can carry
LANand SANtraffic on the same cable.
CiscoUCS uses Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to carry Fibre Channel and Ethernettraffic on the same
physicalEthernet connection between the fabric interconnect and the server. This connection terminates at a
convergednetwork adapter on the server, and the unified fabric terminates on the uplink ports of the fabric
interconnect.On the core network, the LAN and SAN traffic remains separated. Cisco UCS does not require
thatyou implementunified fabric acrossthe data center.
Theconverged network adapter presents an Ethernet interface and Fibre Channel interface to the operating
system.At the server, the operating system is not aware of the FCoE encapsulation because it sees a standard
FibreChannel HBA.
Cisco UCS Manager GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.0
10 OL-25712-04
Unified Fabric