Featured VMUG presentation: Designing a vSphere deployment for Cisco UCS Blades

Last friday the 18th meeting of the Belgium VMUG took place in Wemmel, near Brussels. It was the second full day conference for this VMUG, and (again) a great success. More than 150 VMUG members attended the meeting.

Ramses Smeyers of Cisco presented some good content on how to design your vSphere environment using Cisco UCS blades. Some key take aways of this presentation are:

• A general architecture of UCS-B;
• How to configure and optimize your UCS service profiles, for example:
  • Try to configure boot-from-SAN;
  • Don’t use local resources (no swap on local disks);
• Examples of service profile mobility;
• The importance of naming conventions in UCSM;
• How to optimize network and storage redundancy;
• QOS in UCS;
• Recommended BIOS settings;
• Cluster Design;
• Network design, e.g:
  • vSwitch design;
  • MAC addressing/MAC Pools;
  • vMotion optimized design;
• Storage design, port WWN pools and boot-from-SAN;
• How to deploy UCS in combination with VMware Auto Deploy;

This presentation is a must read for everyone deploying vSphere in combination with Cisco UCS-B. The full presentation is available for download through the VMUG website. You will need a vmug.com account, registration is free.

Ramses will organize a UCS Discovery session for all VMUG Members on December 13th and January 22nd at Cisco in Diegem. More information will be available on the Cisco Belgium LinkedIN Group.