Now, as we have a better understanding of the various components of the Cisco UCS platform, we can dive into the physical installation of UCS Fabric Interconnects and chassis, including blade servers, IOM modules, fan units, power supplies, SFP+ modules, and physical cabling.

Before the physical installation of the UCS solution, it is also imperative to consider other data center design factors, including:

• Building floor load-bearing capacity
• Rack requirements for UCS chassis and Fabric Interconnects
• Rack heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC)

Any standard 19-inch rack with a minimum depth of 29 inches to a maximum of 35 inches from front to rear rails with 42U height can be an ideal rack solution for Cisco UCS equipment. However, rack size can vary based on different requirements and the data center's landscape. The rack should provide sufficient space for power, cooling, and cabling for all the devices. It should be designed according to data center best practices to optimize its resources. The front and rear doors should provide sufficient space to rack and stack the equipment and adequate space for all types of cabling. Suitable cable managers can be used to manage the cables coming from all the devices. It is always recommended that heavier devices be placed at the bottom and lighter devices at the top. For example, a Cisco UCS B-Series chassis can be placed at the bottom and Fabric Interconnect at the top...

Care must be taken during the installation of all components as failure to follow installation procedures may result in component malfunction and bodily injury.

Physical installation is divided into three sections:

• Blade server component (CPU, memory, hard drives, and mezzanine card) installation
• Chassis and component (blade servers, IOMs, fan units, and power supplies) installation
• Fabric Interconnect installation and physical cabling

Cisco UCS blade servers are designed with...

The Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect is a top-of-rack switch that connects the LAN, SAN, and management to underlying physical compute servers for Ethernet and Fibre Channel access. Normally, a pair of Fabric Interconnects can be installed either in a single rack or distributed across two racks to provide rack and power redundancy. Fabric Interconnects can be installed at the bottom in case the network cabling is planned under the floor. All the components in a Fabric Interconnect come installed by default from the factory; only external components such as Ethernet modules, power supplies, and fans need to be connected.

Interconnect includes two redundant hot-swappable power supply units. It is recommended that the power supply in the rack come from two different energy sources and installed with a redundant power distribution unit (PDU). It requires a maximum of 750 Watts of power.

UCS is a network-and-computer integrated solution. All management and data movement intelligence for chassis components and blade servers is present in the Fabric Interconnects and Fabric Extenders (which are line cards for the FIs, also called I/O modules, or IOMs). Therefore, proper cabling between Fabric Interconnects and I/O modules is an important design consideration.

Fabric Extenders are used to connect blade server chassis to Fabric Interconnects. The I/O modules act as line cards to the Fabric Interconnects. It is therefore necessary to maintain proper connectivity between IOMs and Fabric Interconnects. Since an IOM becomes part of the Fabric Interconnect...

The UCS 5108 blade chassis comes with an option of up to four power supply units. Each power supply is a single-phase unit and provides 2500 Watts. Depending on the total number of power supplies in the chassis and input power sources, UCS 5108 can be configured in three modes.

In a non-redundant configuration, power supplies installed in the system provide adequate power. A power supply failure results in a chassis failure. Load is evenly distributed among power supplies; however, there is no power redundancy.

In N+1 redundant mode, at least one extra...

Cisco SingleConnect is the most efficient and simplest way to connect and manage the compute servers in a data center. It unifies multiple types of traffic, such as LAN, SAN, and management, into a single channel with increased utilization and reduces the complex cabling structure in data centers. SingleConnect technology provides an end-to-end system I/O architecture with a single cable for Cisco blade servers, rack server, and virtual machines. Cisco SingleConnect can connect to:

• Physical servers and virtual machines
• LAN, SAN, and management networks
• Cisco B-Series and C-Series servers

Cisco VICs inside blade or rack servers connect through a Cisco Fabric Extender (FEX/IOM) to Fabric Interconnects with a single network link to provide data, storage, and management traffic. The single network layer uses the unified fabric to reduce the three-network layer into one, helping us save...

Proper planning of data center power, cooling, spacing, and environmental factors will not only optimize the data center resources, it will also bring down the operational cost of manage devices. Cisco UCS hardware components have been designed with efficient power supplies, front-to-rear cooling, a unified fabric to reduce cabling requirements, and fewer network components for easy and simplified management of data centers. In this chapter, we learned rack installation and the installation of UCS hardware components such as chassis, blade, I/O module, Fabric Interconnect, and rack servers. We also discussed Cisco SingleConnect technology, an efficient way to connect blade servers, rack servers, and virtual machines in a data center.

In the next chapter, we will learn about Cisco UCS Emulator which is an excellent tool for exploring UCSM software.