Lab4: Configure UCSM Server Policies

In this lab, we configure a Management IP Pool for external blade management, a Universally Unique Identifier pool, and Server Pools. These pools along with previously created pools are used in creating Service Profile Template.

UCS pools are collections of identities, or physical or logical resources that are available in the system. Pools increase the flexibility of Service Profiles and allow you to centrally manage your system resources. You can use pools to segment unconfigured servers or available ranges of server identity information into groupings that make sense for the Data Center. For example, if you create a pool of unconfigured servers with similar characteristics and include that pool in a Service Profile, you can use a policy to associate that Service Profile with an available unconfigured server.

Management IP Pool

The management IP pool is a collection of external IP addresses. Cisco UCS Manager reserves each block of IP addresses in the management IP pool for external access that terminates in the Cisco Integrated Management Console (CIMC) on a server. Cisco UCS Manager uses the IP addresses in a management IP pool for external access to a server through a KVM console, Serial over LAN, or Intelligent Platform Mangement Interface (IPMI). This traffic flows through the management port on the UCS 6200s. So the pool must be on the same subnet as the management interfaces on the 6200s.

Maintenance Policies

The change deployment can occur in one of the following ways:

• Immediately
• When acknowledged by a user with admin privileges
• Automatically at the time specified in the schedule

If the maintenance policy is configured to deploy the change during a scheduled maintenance window, the policy must include a valid schedule. The schedule deploys the changes in the first available maintenance window.

Universally Unique Identifier (UUID)

A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is an identifier standard used in software construction, standardized by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). The intent of UUIDs is to enable distributed systems to uniquely identify information without significant central coordination.

Server Pool

A Server Pool contains a set of servers. These servers typically share the same characteristics. Those characteristics can be their location in the chassis, or an attribute such as server type, amount of memory, local storage, type of CPU, or local drive configuration. You can manually assign a server to a Server Pool, or use Server Pool policies and Server Pool policy qualifications to automate the assignment.

If your system implements multi-tenancy through organizations, you can designate one or more Server Pools to be used by a specific organization. For example, a pool that includes all servers with two CPUs could be assigned to the Marketing organization, while all servers with 64 GB memory could be assigned to the Finance organization.

A Server Pool can include servers from any chassis in the system. A given server can belong to multiple Server Pools.

Service Profile

Every server that is provisioned in the Cisco Unified Computing System is specified by a Service Profile, or logical server. The Service Profile represents a logical view of a single blade server, without the need to know exactly which blade you are referencing. The profile object contains the server personality, for example, identity, network information and so forth. The profile can then be associated with a single blade at a time. The concept of profiles was invented to support the notion of logical server mobility, or the transfer of identity transparently from one blade to another, as well as the pooling concept.

Service Profiles are stored in the Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects. When a Service Profile is deployed to a server, UCS Manager automatically configures the server, adapters, Fabric Extenders, and Fabric Interconnects to match the configuration specified in the Service Profile. This automation of device configuration reduces the number of manual steps required to configure servers, network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), and LAN and SAN switches.

Service Profile overview – a Service Profile typically includes four types of information:

• Server definition – defines the resources (e.g. a specific server or a blade inserted to a specific chassis) to which the profile is applied
• Identity information – identity information includes the UUID, MAC address for each virtual NIC (vNIC), and World Wide Name (WWN) specifications for each HBA
• Firmware revision specifications – these are used when installation of a specific firmware revision is required
• Connectivity definition – used to configure network adapters, Fabric Extenders, and parent interconnects; however this information is abstract as it does not include the details of how each network component is configured

Server administrators can also create a Service Profile Template that can be used later to create Service Profiles in an easier way. A Service Template can be derived from a Service Profile, with server and I/O interface identity information abstracted. Instead of specifying exact UUID, MAC address, and WWN values, a Service Template specifies where to get these values. For example, a Service Profile Template might specify the standard network connectivity for a web server and the pool from which its interfaces’ MAC addresses can be obtained. Service Profile Templates can be used to provision many servers with the same simplicity as creating a single one.

There are two types of Service Profiles in a UCS system:

• Service Profiles that inherit server identity – these Service Profiles are similar in concept to a rack-mounted server. These Service Profiles use the burned-in values (like MAC addresses, WWN addresses, BIOS version and settings, etc.) of the hardware. Due to the permanence of these values, these profiles are not easily portable and cannot be used when moving one server to another. In other words, these profiles exhibit the nature of 1:1 mapping and thus require changes to be made to them when moving from one server to another.
• Service Profiles that override server identity – these service policies exhibit the nature of stateless computing in a UCS system. These Service Profiles assume the resources (like MAC addresses, WWN addresses, BIOS version, etc.) from a resource pool already created in the UCS manager. The settings or values from these resource pools override the burned-in values of the hardware. Hence these profiles are very flexible and can be moved from one server to another easily, and this movement is transparent to the network. In other words, these profiles provide a one-to-many mapping and require no change to be made to them when moving from one server to another.

See “Understanding Cisco Unified Computing System Service Profiles” for more information. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps10265/ps10281/white_paper_c11-590518.html

Terms used in Service Profiles:

• UUID – Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to uniquely identify a component worldwide. Cisco UCS Manager generates a unique UUID for each Server Blade when a pool is defined in a Service Profile
• Virtual Host Bus Adapter (vHBA) – a virtual interface providing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) from a server blade to a vSAN through a virtual interface on the 6200 Fabric Interconnect
• Virtual Network Interface Controller (vNIC) – virtual interface providing Ethernet connectivity to a VLAN through a virtual interface on the 6200 Fabric Interconnect
• World Wide Name (WWN) Address – 64-bit address that is used within the Fibre Channel specification for assigning a unique ID to each element within a Fibre Channel Fabric. WWNs are classified as WWPN and WWNN
• World Wide Port Name (WWPN) – unique address assigned to a port (vHBA) in a Fibre Channel Fabric. The WWPN performs a function equivalent to the MAC address in Ethernet protocol
• World Wide Node Name (WWNN) – unique address assigned to a node (UCS server blade) in a Fibre Channel Fabric. It is valid for the same WWNN to be seen on many different ports (different addresses) on the network, identifying the ports as multiple network interfaces of a single network node
• Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) – an open standard technology that defines how administrators monitor system hardware and sensors, control system components and retrieve logs of important system events to conduct remote management and recovery
• Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) – a protocol used to boot computers using a network interface independently of available data storage devices or installed operating systems. PXE is approximately a combination of TFTP and DHCP
• Logical Unit (LUN) – an identification/addressing scheme for storage disks. Fibre Channel supports 32 addresses (0-31). A LUN may refer to a single disk, a subset of a single disk or an array of disks

Service Profile Templates

Service Profile Templates enable you to create a large number of similar Service Profiles. With a Service Profile Template, you can quickly create several Service Profiles with the same basic parameters, such as the number of vNICs and vHBAs, and with identity information drawn from the same pools.