[cisco-voip] Cisco UCS B Series Chassis

[Paul]

The benefits of virtualization are pretty obvious:

You can (shutdown and then) backup your virtual machine in its current working 
state. If, for some reason, your VM takes a dump or your entire chassis takes a 
dive south so long as you have the appropriate hardware available to run the 
backup VM upon you can just hit start and it will be as if nothing had happened. 
You can't do that with MCS boxes.

You can create templates of one server and just deploy across the board with it.
OVA files are available just for this purpose.

The UCS system has a very nice Java KVM built into it. The XML GUI interface 
lets you control and monitor almost every last bit of hardware in the chassis. 
It does a fairly nice job of separating the applications from the underlying 
hardware so you can move applications from one blade to another without having 
to call Cisco Licensing about a MAC address change.

The downsides of virtualization are also pretty obvious:

You're introducing another layer of complexity into your system which requires 
knowledge of that extra layer in the event it decides to not play nice with you.

The downsides of UCS is...it's freakin' expensive. FCoE isn't cheap and neither 
are the Menlo or Palo cards but that's the hardware that B-series seems to 
require for you to get the most out of the system. You're also required to learn 
the extra complexity of UCS itself and the ins-and-outs of creating server 
profiles instead of installing UC applications onto hardware directly a la MCS.

Virtualization is the direction this industry is headed...if you don't at least 
know vSphere or Xen within the next year or two...you might not be working very 
much from where I'm standing. 80-90% of the projects I'm working on this year 
will be all UC on UCS with vSphere. It's not really a choice anymore for a lot 
of customers that don't see the point of having MCS boxes around not running at 
full capacity when their other major applications are virtualized and using the 
majority of resources allocated to them.



________________________________
From:Daniel <dan.voip at danofive.id.au>
To:cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Sent: Tue, March 8, 2011 2:18:47 AM
Subject: [cisco-voip] Cisco UCS B Series Chassis

Hi Guys,

How people here are using the UCS hardware and virtualising their UC servers?

Anyone got any stories from their upgrade? or pro's and con's?

What do you miss from the hardware appliances, what do you like about the UCS 
implementation?

cheers,

Dan