Overview of service profiles

A service profile is the principal feature of the UCS platform that enables stateless computing. Service profiles radically improve server provisioning and troubleshooting. Servers can be provisioned in software even before the delivery of physical hardware; in case of hardware failure, it can be replaced by associating the existing software service profile of the failed server without going through any painstaking firmware upgrade procedures.

UCS Manager abstracts a service profile from the configurations available under the following categories:

• Identity and resource pools: As explained in Chapter 6, Creating Identity and Resource Pools, identity and resource pools provide silos for computing node-unique characteristics such as MAC addresses, WWNs, and UUIDs. These identities uniquely recognize systems on the network. UCS servers abstract these physical identities from software pools available from UCS Manager instead of using burned hardware identities.

• Service...