Cisco Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Server White Paper
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public information.
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Cisco UCS and Dell PowerEdge M1000e: A Comparison
June 2016
Greater Availability and More Flexibility
Cisco UCS not only provides an active-active data fabric out of the box, but it also
provides a fully redundant unified management subsystem. As with other similar
traditional designs, Dell blade server I/O connections are fixed and physically
mapped in the midplane and cannot be modified in any way. For example, Dell
network interface card (NIC) port 1 goes to interconnect bay A1, and Dell NIC port
2 goes to interconnect bay A2. Any changes in connectivity between a blade and
the outside world forces customers to manually remove or add and recable the
physical Dell switches and server I/O adapters. This recabling results in downtime
and is prone to errors. In contrast, Cisco UCS is truly a wire-once technology
that allows any changes, including port mapping and I/O assignment, to be fully
programmatically implemented and user defined.
provides a fully redundant unified management subsystem. As with other similar
traditional designs, Dell blade server I/O connections are fixed and physically
mapped in the midplane and cannot be modified in any way. For example, Dell
network interface card (NIC) port 1 goes to interconnect bay A1, and Dell NIC port
2 goes to interconnect bay A2. Any changes in connectivity between a blade and
the outside world forces customers to manually remove or add and recable the
physical Dell switches and server I/O adapters. This recabling results in downtime
and is prone to errors. In contrast, Cisco UCS is truly a wire-once technology
that allows any changes, including port mapping and I/O assignment, to be fully
programmatically implemented and user defined.
Using Cisco UCS virtual interface cards (VICs), Cisco UCS servers can be
configured for any workload in minutes, without touching the server. Cisco UCS
VICs present up to 256 PCI Express (PCIe) standards-compliant interfaces to the
host that can be dynamically configured as either NICs or host bus adapters (HBAs).
These adapters can be accessed by the operating system or hypervisor, and they
also can be attached directly to virtual machines, accelerating performance. Cisco
UCS VICs support hardware fabric failover so that if one fabric fails, the operating
system never knows about it. You have the option to use OS-based NIC teaming or
Cisco UCS hardware fabric failover, or both, depending on application requirements.
You can configure this option on a per–virtual NIC (vNIC) basis.
configured for any workload in minutes, without touching the server. Cisco UCS
VICs present up to 256 PCI Express (PCIe) standards-compliant interfaces to the
host that can be dynamically configured as either NICs or host bus adapters (HBAs).
These adapters can be accessed by the operating system or hypervisor, and they
also can be attached directly to virtual machines, accelerating performance. Cisco
UCS VICs support hardware fabric failover so that if one fabric fails, the operating
system never knows about it. You have the option to use OS-based NIC teaming or
Cisco UCS hardware fabric failover, or both, depending on application requirements.
You can configure this option on a per–virtual NIC (vNIC) basis.
As Figure 4 illustrates, NIC 1 is configured with a primary path to fabric A, with
failover configured on fabric B. Similarly, NIC 2 is configured with a primary path to
fabric B, with failover configured on fabric A.
failover configured on fabric B. Similarly, NIC 2 is configured with a primary path to
fabric B, with failover configured on fabric A.
KR
4 10GBASE-KR
Unified Network
Fabric, 2 to Each
Fabric Extender
Mezzanine LOM
Card Form
Factor
4 Additional
10-Gbps Connections
Enabled with Optional
Port Expander Card
Hardware
PortChannels
Primary
Path
Secondary
Path
More Than 256
Programmable
Virtual
Interfaces
Cisco UCS
VIC 1340
…
Ethernet NICs
Fibre Channel HBAs
20-Gbps Bandwidth
to Fabric A
20-Gbps Bandwidth
to Fabric B
0
1
2
3
4
KR
KR
KR
KR
Figure 4 Fabric Failover Is Supported on the Cisco UCS VIC 1340