Preface

This book is for competent system, network, or storage administrators who are working with Cisco UCS, but they now want to learn innovative ways to compute or deploy UCS to leverage its full potential.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Cisco UCS to SAN Connectivity, is about how to upgrade firmware on Fibre SAN Switch and how to set up the interconnection of Cisco UCS to Brocade FC Switch and Cisco UCS to Cisco FC Switch.

Chapter 2, Cisco UCS to LAN Connectivity, describes how to configure the Ethernet uplink, LAN pin groups and Ethernet port channel on UCS Fabric Interconnect, and set up NIC Teaming on Microsoft Windows and VMware vSphere ESXi.

Chapter 3, Installing an Operating System on Cisco UCS, covers the system platform installation on Cisco UCS. It includes Microsoft Windows and VMware vSphere Server in local boot and SAN boot.

Chapter 4, Data Migration to Cisco UCS, describes how to migrate the physical machine and virtual machine from HP Server to Cisco UCS.

Chapter 5, System Integration on Cisco UCS, describes how to set up system integration on Cisco UCS, for example, UCS Management Pack in VMware vRealize Operation Manager, and UCS Central best practices.

Chapter 6, Cisco UCS Site Planning, describes how to use Cisco UCS compatibility Support Matrix and other vendor interoperability tools, such as EMC E-lab, HP Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK), VMware Compatibility Guide, and IBM System Storage Interoperation Center (SSIC).

Chapter 7, Cisco UCS Backup Solutions, describes how to backup and restore Cisco UCS configurations, the backup solutions on Cisco UCS in detail, for example, VMware Data Protection, HP 3PAR array's virtual copy/remote copy, and EMC VNX array's SnapClone and MirrorView.

What you need for this book

This book requires the following software: Cisco UCS Manager 2.2, Cisco UCS Central 1.4, VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware vCenter Server 5.5, vCenter Operation Manager 6.0, Microsoft Windows 2008/2012, HP 3PAR Management Console 4.6, and EMC Unisphere 1.3.

Who this book is for

This book is for competent system/network or storage administrators who are working with Cisco UCS but now want to learn new ways to compute UCS.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "After finishing the FOS download, the example of the FOS file name would be v7.1.1c1.zip."

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

portCfgFillword port, mode

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select SAN Switches in the Download by menu and download the Fabric Operating System (FOS) version you want."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Customer support

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Downloading the color images of this book

We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/CiscoUCSCookbook_ColorImages.pdf.

Errata

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Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <questions@packtpub.com>, and we will do our best to address the problem.