This document provides a list of competing features from the HP BladeSystem and Cisco UCS solutions. The objective of the document is to highlight weaknesses and strengths as a starting point for an enhanced competition to UCS in the Data Center area.
Moving to a well-managed IT architecture streamlines server deployment and reduces maintenance time. Your infrastructure should be highly available, easy to use, scalable, and cost-effective to implement. Cisco UCS Manager provides a streamlined method for automating hardware setup and firmware updates in one highly available solution to keep management costs down. Due to its converged network model, Cisco UCS Manager provides all of this functionality in a cost-effective package with no hidden fees or additional licensing costs. In contrast, HP Virtual Connect with OneView provides fewer vital features out of the box, increases network and management complexity, requires additional hardware and licensing, and has lower available network bandwidth in a configuration comparable in price to the Cisco UCS solution. With more available network bandwidth to the blade for similar cost, less network complexity, streamlined deployment and management, and greater out-of-box functionality, Cisco UCS provides a flexible and cost-effective solution to meet your architectural needs.
This document provides a list of competing features from the HP BladeSystem and Cisco UCS solutions. The objective of the document is to highlight weaknesses and strengths as a starting point for an enhanced competition to UCS in the Data Center area.
Moving to a well-managed IT architecture streamlines server deployment and reduces maintenance time. Your infrastructure should be highly available, easy to use, scalable, and cost-effective to implement. Cisco UCS Manager provides a streamlined method for automating hardware setup and firmware updates in one highly available solution to keep management costs down. Due to its converged network model, Cisco UCS Manager provides all of this functionality in a cost-effective package with no hidden fees or additional licensing costs. In contrast, HP Virtual Connect with OneView provides fewer vital features out of the box, increases network and management complexity, requires additional hardware and licensing, and has lower available network bandwidth in a configuration comparable in price to the Cisco UCS solution. With more available network bandwidth to the blade for similar cost, less network complexity, streamlined deployment and management, and greater out-of-box functionality, Cisco UCS provides a flexible and cost-effective solution to meet your architectural needs.
Why A Blade Server?
More agile & scalable
Less setup & installation time
Less expensive in long-term deployments
Efficient cooling and power consumption
Eliminating SAN Congestion Just Got Much Easier- webinar - Nov 2015 Tony Antony
Today’s storage area networks (SANs) face tremendous pressure from the phenomenal growth of digital information and the need to access it quickly and efficiently. Worldwide data is projected to multiply by an astonishing 1000 percent by 2020. It’s little wonder, then, that storage administrators rank slow drain and related SAN congestion issues as their number-one concern. If not addressed in a timely fashion, these can have a domino effect, even degrading the performance of totally unrelated applications.
Find out how the Cisco Data Center Network Manager tool provides centralized monitoring and reporting of slow drain conditions across your entire fabric, enabling you to easily pinpoint the exact sources of congestion. Discover how these solutions maximize the performance of your existing SAN as we reveal:
•Common causes of slow drain
•Best practices for avoiding congestion
•Tools for Cisco Nexus and MDS switches that speed detection and recovery
•Recent innovations that fully automate resolution
The Cisco Unified Computing System™ is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The
system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.
Get a technical understanding of the components of NSX, including how switching, routing, firewalling, load-balancing and other services work within NSX.
Why A Blade Server?
More agile & scalable
Less setup & installation time
Less expensive in long-term deployments
Efficient cooling and power consumption
Eliminating SAN Congestion Just Got Much Easier- webinar - Nov 2015 Tony Antony
Today’s storage area networks (SANs) face tremendous pressure from the phenomenal growth of digital information and the need to access it quickly and efficiently. Worldwide data is projected to multiply by an astonishing 1000 percent by 2020. It’s little wonder, then, that storage administrators rank slow drain and related SAN congestion issues as their number-one concern. If not addressed in a timely fashion, these can have a domino effect, even degrading the performance of totally unrelated applications.
Find out how the Cisco Data Center Network Manager tool provides centralized monitoring and reporting of slow drain conditions across your entire fabric, enabling you to easily pinpoint the exact sources of congestion. Discover how these solutions maximize the performance of your existing SAN as we reveal:
•Common causes of slow drain
•Best practices for avoiding congestion
•Tools for Cisco Nexus and MDS switches that speed detection and recovery
•Recent innovations that fully automate resolution
The Cisco Unified Computing System™ is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The
system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.
Get a technical understanding of the components of NSX, including how switching, routing, firewalling, load-balancing and other services work within NSX.
SVR208 Gaining Higher Availability with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clust...Louis Göhl
Come and learn about all the new enhancements that are going to be delivered in Failover Clustering with Windows Server 2008 R2. This session looks at improvements since Windows Server 2008 including an overview of Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), live migration, enhanced validation, PowerShell support, new HA workloads, improvements to existing workloads, supportability enhancements, and other exciting features designed to help you achieve even HIGHER availability for your Failover Cluster.
SIM204-What's Coming in Virtual Machine Manager 2012?Lai Yoong Seng
In this session, we (Raymond Chou (SCOM MVP) & Lai Yoong Seng (VM MVP) provided an overview of the new features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 which included new architecture of VMM 2012 and 4 pillar of management:- deployment, fabric, cloud and services management at Microsoft Tech-Ed New Zealand 2011 (Auckland).
System Center 2012 for VMware InfrastructureBryan Dady
Slides from a group presentation I was privileged to participate in during the last Microsoft Management Summit (MMS, April 2013).
The original is hosted by Microsoft at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B309, and I've copied this edition here for sharing on my LinkedIn profile.
Microsoft Virtualization for VMware ProfessionalsEduardo Castro
Esta es la presentación utilizada en el WebCast de Semana de la Nube
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=es-AR&EventID=1032491907&CountryCode=AR
En este evento encontrará una introducción a la virtualización con productos y soluciones Microsoft para los VMware Professionals.
VMware Continuent, a multi-site, multi-master database cluster solution, provides a full data management solution that is already handling billions of transactions daily for our customers, on-premises and in the cloud.
Learn how Continuent and MySQL can run business-critical applications in vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud solution:
- What is vCloud Air and how it can benefit your company
- Overview of DBMS operation in vCloud Air
- Tips and tricks for running Continuent MySQL clusters
- Roadmap for Continuent in vCloud Air as well as vSphere support.
We have a lot of great work on tap related to vCloud Air as well as VMware products in general. Join us for this glimpse into the future of Continuent clustering and replication at VMware.
As Enterprises increasingly span their workloads across on-premises data centers and cloud environments, it is becoming significantly complex for IT teams to enable better workload portability and create consistent application delivery and networking services.
In this webinar, you will learn how VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer facilitates seamless application delivery and provides choices to deploy your applications across on-premises data centers and Oracle Cloud Virtual Services (OCVS) while enabling:
Modern Application Delivery: Consider consistency, elastic scalability, cloud-native automation, and built-in end-to-end observability when choosing load balancing across hybrid environments.
Data-center Extension: Ensure continuous operations while providing elastic L4-L7 load balancing, security, and real-time application analytics for VMware-based apps running in Google Cloud.
Lift-and-Shift: When migrating to OCVS from an on-premises data center, operationalize uninterrupted enterprise-grade features, including GSLB and WAF.
Similar to Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager v1.2 (20)
Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager provides customers with a number of capabilities to help streamline operations and increase productivity. Along with the single console that centralizes management for multiple enclosures, the central database helps to eliminate the risk of address conflicts. The new domain grouping feature creates baselines to simplify configuration and change management, and provides the basis that allows VCEM to move server profiles between enclosures Organizations with multiple Bladesystem enclosures can use Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager to complete tasks across the datacenter more quickly, consistently and reliably, such as: Adding new blade servers and BladeSystem enclosures Modifying multiple enclosure configurations Recovering problematic servers to spare blades Performing more efficient system maintenance Migrating and repurposing servers to address workload requirements A subsequent slide in this presentation takes a closer look at some of the primary usage scenarios
Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager provides customers with a number of capabilities to help streamline operations and increase productivity. Along with the single console that centralizes management for multiple enclosures, the central database helps to eliminate the risk of address conflicts. The new domain grouping feature creates baselines to simplify configuration and change management, and provides the basis that allows VCEM to move server profiles between enclosures Organizations with multiple Bladesystem enclosures can use Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager to complete tasks across the datacenter more quickly, consistently and reliably, such as: Adding new blade servers and BladeSystem enclosures Modifying multiple enclosure configurations Recovering problematic servers to spare blades Performing more efficient system maintenance Migrating and repurposing servers to address workload requirements A subsequent slide in this presentation takes a closer look at some of the primary usage scenarios
Virtual Connect domain grouping allows multiple enclosures that access the same networks to be configured and managed using a common profile. This increases infrastructure consistency and simplifies the deployment of new enclosures. The first enclosure added to a domain group establishes the master configuration that all other group members will use, which includes LAN and SAN connections. Administrators can now make changes to multiple enclosures using a single process, or install new bare-metal enclosures more quickly by simply adding then to a domain group. The master profile of the domain group will automatically apply the same connection configurations to the new enclosure, which avoids having to configure each enclosure individually and allows new hardware to be deployed quickly Domain grouping saves time, reduces deployment costs and removes the potential for configuration errors and conflicts
Since the introduction of Virtual Connect technology administrators have been able to move server profiles between the bays of a single enclosure using the embedded Virtual Connect Manager. With Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager HP has expanded this capability across the datacenter. Administrators can now move or failover server profiles between enclosure bays, BladeSystem enclosures and Virtual Connect domains within the same Virtual Connect domain group with just a few mouse clicks. Whether the target is the next bay, an enclosure in the adjacent rack or another datacenter, as long as the source and target locations are within the same Virtual Connect domain group the move is possible. And because Virtual Connect technology is at the heart of the solution, LAN and SAN connections automatically move with the server profile to the target location and are re-established Server profile movement can be initiated manually through the VCEM UI or scripted through a command line. The v1.10 release in May 2008 also introduced the ability to establish a pool of spare servers for each VC Domain Group that can be used to help automate the failover of Virtual Connect profiles for an even faster response to known system events or performance conditions. Subsequent slides provide more detail of profile failover VCEM includes profile movement history and an audit trail of who did what, and when they did it. Future releases plan to include tighter integration with customers ’ change management processes Customers will see the best results from this capability in a Boot from SAN environment, where profile movement and server availability can be completed in a few minutes with no additional intervention because the boot OS is already on the SAN. The profile failover capability requires boot-from SAN. Local boot environments will require additional administration to ensure a bootable operating system is available prior to server profile movement. In this scenario the HP Rapid Deployment Pack could be used as an efficient solution to quickly deploy a bootable OS image.
This slide represents some of the core uses cases for server profile movement, which includes: Cost effective server recovery to any spare bay within a Virtual Connect Domain Group, even if the CPU and memory size is not identical. More efficient systems maintenance that avoids lengthy production downtime or significant out of hours operations A simple solution for repurposing or migrating server resources and workloads across the datacenter
Note: This slide is animated and best shown in slideshow mode . 2 mouse clicks complete the sequence To further demonstrate the principles of server profile movement, this example shows a simple Virtual Connect Domain group containing 2 BladeSystem c-Class enclosures. At the top Virtual Connect is controlling the connections to the LAN and VLANs on the left and the boot-from SAN and application environment on the right. The red server represents a production server and the blue server a designated spare. In the event that the production server needs replacing or removing from production, and we need to move the workload to another server, all we need to do is power down the red server, move the server profile to the blue server in the other enclosure using Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, and then power up the blue server which has now replaced the original production server. We discussed on the previous slide we can perform this process manually, or use the profile failover capability to help automate and speed up the process When we move the server profile all the LAN, SAN and OS boot information moves with it and Virtual Connect automatically re-establishes the network connections
Organizations with multiple Bladesystem enclosures can use Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager to complete tasks across the datacenter more quickly, consistently and reliably, such as: Adding new blade servers and BladeSystem enclosures Recovering problematic servers to spare blades Performing more efficient system maintenance Or migrating and repurposing servers to address workload requirements Organizations with multiple remote locations can also use the domain grouping capabilities to centralize infrastructure management, and reduce travel costs
VCEM can be installed usinf 3 primary methods: as a standalone solution on its own physical server, as a plug-in to HP SIM v5.2 and higher, or as a standalone install on an ESX VM. NOTE: The standalone option is recommended for installing VCEM on a VM because not all elements in HP SIM (e.g. Service and Warranty Management ) work well on a VM host, plus there are also performance issues to consider.
This slide helps to demonstrate the real value that VCEM enclosure-based licensing provides. Traditional per server licensing usually means that you have to repurchase software licenses when you replace or upgrade servers. With enclosure-based licensing you can now add, modify and even upgrade servers to new generations without having to replace the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager software license VCEM enclosure-based licensing covers all bays in the enclosure for the life of the enclosure