Service Profile Renaming

Yes, finally, you can rename service profiles. No more struggling to name your profiles perfectly the first time. When a profile is renamed, all the unique attributes including the MACs, WWNs, UUID, etc, are preserved. This can be done when the server is live and online without any impact.

VM-FEX for Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM

In addition to vSphere, VM-FEX (which I've written about here) is now available when using the Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors on UCS. On the Microsoft side, VM-FEX is only compatible with Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2012 (and newer). UCS is able to leverage Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV, which I've written about here) in each hypervisor to speed up network performance and ensure separation of multiple tenants/workloads at the hardware NIC level.

I read an excellent blog post by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) this week on Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) titled "What is SR-IOV?". It's an older post but it did a great job of solidifying my understanding and filling in the knowledge gaps. One thing that stuck out was this bit:

SR-IOV requires support in the BIOS as well as in the operating system instance or hypervisor that is running on the hardware. Until very recently, I had been under the impression that SR-IOV was handled solely in hardware and did not require any software support; unfortunately, I was mistaken. Software support in the operating system instance or hypervisor is definitely required.

I attended the Cisco Plus Canada Roadshow in Calgary recently and sat in on a day of presentations related to Cisco's data center/cloud offerings. The sessions where quite good and I ended up taking quite a few notes. I thought I'd blog my notes in order to share what was presented.

The four sessions were:

• Journey to the Cloud
• Cisco UCS
• Data Center Networking
• Powering the Cloud