One of the tasks you should complete during the installation of the Cisco UCS Manager is configuring the Fabric Interconnects with a trusted SSL certificate. The procedure is straight forward, and only needs to be completed once, since the two Fabric Interconnects are clustered and the configuration is replicated between...
For those of you using Cisco UCS servers and the new Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2012, check out the UCS Management Pack v2.5. You can download it from here. According to the release notes the following operating systems are supported:Windows Vista Windows Server 2008Windows Server 2008 R2Windows 7What's new...
If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to experiment with configurations but don't want to mess up your production environment, Cisco offers the free UCS Platform Emulator VM. They regularly update the emulator, and their most current version is v2.0.94849.368934. You can download the emulator here. You can...
UPDATE 2 5/15/2012: Looks like VMware/Cisco pulled the 5.0 U1 custom ISO installation media. So follow my blog post below to create your own. UPDATE 1 4/23/12: Cisco released a customized vSphere 5.0 U1 installation ISO with all of their latest drivers. You can download it here under OEM Customized Installer...
If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to install Windows on a physical server, you will quickly realize not all of the needed drivers are baked into Windows. While Cisco does provide small ISO files for various drivers you can mount during the installation process, it requires manual...
This session focused on the Cisco distributed virtual switch, the Nexus 1000v. The speaker was very knowledgeable and a great presenter. Lots of great details, but as fast as he was going I didn't get all of the details. You can check out the his blog at jasonnash.com.Highlights: The VSM...
Today while I was walking around the vendor expo at VMworld 2011, I saw a very interesting product from Cisco. I was familiar with the datacenter UCS product, but a mini version caught my attention. Called UCS Express this is a micro ESXi server that slides directly into their ISR G2...
This session was a 'super session' which is basically a vendor touting their wares and how well they integrate with VMware. To that end Cisco went through a number of announcements and innovations that are really industry leading. High points of this session were: Policy based management is key to deploying...
Hot off the presses is a Cisco 'announcement' of a virtual ASA product that is in the works, although no details were released about pricing and availability. It will leverage the capabilities of the Nexus 1000v DVS, and is more for edge protection (North-South traffic), vice internal traffic (East-West) which...
A few days ago Cisco released a new version of their virtual Nexus 1000v switch, version 4.0(4)SV1(3). You can read the release notes here. Major new features include:- GUI configuration setup which creates VMware port groups, VLANs, turns on SSH, adds the plug-in to vCenter, and other nifty things.- ERSPAN...