Understanding identity and resource pools

The salient feature of the Cisco UCS platform is stateless computing. In the Cisco UCS platform, none of the computer peripherals consume the hardware's burned-in identities. Rather, all the unique characteristics are extracted from identity and resource pools, which reside on the Fabric Interconnects (FIs) and are managed using UCSM. These resource and identity pools are defined in an XML format, which makes them extremely portable and easily modifiable. UCS computers and peripherals extract these identities from UCSM in the form of a service profile. A service profile has all the server identities, including UUIDs, MACs, WWNNs/WWPNs, firmware versions, BIOS settings, and other server settings. A service profile is associated with the physical server using a customized Linux OS that assigns all the settings in a service profile to the physical server. In case of server...