Part 2 – Components of a UCS System

Components of a UCS System

• Servers – These are our blades
• Service Profile Templates – This is a summary of configs such as VLAN, etc being pushed out to all blades.
• Boot Policy – This determines what’s the type of boot you prefer and here we specify the SAN boot order such as boot luns.
• Fabric Interconnect – This switch provides the uplink to the MDS or Nexus Switch
• IOM – IO Module provides uplink from chassis to Fabric interconnect.
• UCS Blade I/O Adapter Overview ( Cisco VIC Cards) – These cards are responsible for adapter virtualization. Up to 256 vnic can be assigned to ESXi.

Types of Cisco Blades

The usual ones are the B-series and C-Series. S-series is a storage server

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects

UCS IOM Overview or Fabric Extenders ( IOM -A and IOM -B)

UCS Blade I/O Adapter Overview ( Cisco VIC Cards)

These cards are responsible for adapter virtualization and up to 256 vnic can be assigned to ESXi.