Cisco Unified Computing System Overview

The Cisco Unified Computing System^™ (Cisco UCS^®) is a next-generation data center platform that unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization resources in a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 or 40 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class blade and rack x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.

Product Overview

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1385 is a Cisco^® innovation. It provides a policy-based, stateless, agile server infrastructure for your data center. This dual-port Enhanced Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP) half-height PCI Express (PCIe) card is designed exclusively for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers. The card supports 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). It incorporates Cisco’s next-generation converged network adapter (CNA) technology and offers a comprehensive feature set, providing investment protection for future feature software releases. The card can present more than 256 PCIe standards-compliant interfaces to the host, and these can be dynamically configured as either network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs). In addition, the VIC supports Cisco Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology. This technology extends the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect ports to virtual machines, simplifying server virtualization deployment.

Features and Benefits

The Cisco UCS VIC 1385 provides the following features and benefits:

●   Stateless and agile platform: The personality of the card is determined dynamically at boot time using the service profile associated with the server. The number, type (NIC or HBA), identity (MAC address and World Wide Name [WWN]), failover policy, bandwidth, and quality-of-service (QoS) policies of the PCIe interfaces are all determined using the service profile. The capability to define, create, and use interfaces on demand provides a stateless and agile server infrastructure (Figure 2).

●   Network interface virtualization: Each PCIe interface created on the VIC is associated with an interface on the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect, providing complete network separation for each virtual cable between a PCIe device on the VIC and the interface on the Fabric Interconnect (Figure 3).

Next-Generation Data Center Features

A hardware classification engine provides support for advanced data center requirements including stateless network offloads for NVGRE and VXLAN (VMware only), low-latency features for usNIC and RDMA, and performance optimization applications such as VMQ, DPDK, and Cisco NetFlow. The Cisco UCS VIC 1385 provides high network performance and low latency for the most demanding applications:

●   Big data, high-performance computing (HPC), and high-performance trading (HPT)

●   Large-scale virtual machine deployments

●   High-bandwidth storage targets and archives

When the VIC 1385 is used in combination with Cisco Nexus^® 3000 Series Switches, big data and financial trading applications benefit from high bandwidth and low latency. When the VIC is connected to Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches, pools of virtual hosts scale with greater speed and agility. The Cisco Nexus 6004 Switch provides native 40-Gbps FCoE connectivity from the VIC to both Ethernet and Fibre Channel targets.

The VIC provides industry-leading performance and features:

●   Cisco NetFlow: NetFlow is supported at the adapter level, providing network traffic accounting and monitoring down to the virtual machine level for network billing, security, traffic characterization, and denial-of-service (DoS) attack monitoring. NetFlow provides valuable information about network users and applications, peak use times, and traffic routing.

●   Cisco usNIC: usNIC is an ultra-low-latency solution for HPC and HPT applications over Ethernet. The solution includes firmware, kernel driver, user-space driver, and Open Message Passing Interface (MPI) support for Cisco VICs and provides OS bypass services directly to the application layer.

●   Cisco Data Center VM-FEX: VM-FEX technology extends Fabric Interconnect ports directly to virtual machines, eliminating software-based switching in the hypervisor. VM-FEX collapses virtual and physical networking infrastructure into a single infrastructure that is fully aware of the virtual machines’ locations and networking policies (Figure 3). VM-FEX is implemented by Cisco VICs with a prestandard implementation of IEEE 802.1BR Port Extender.

Cisco Nexus Switch Supporting VM-FEX Virtual Machine Migration with VM-FEX