Installing Cisco UCS Hardware

Before installing Cisco UCS hardware, the data center should meet the specific requirements for power, cooling, spacing, cabling, and environmental factors. These factors play a vital role in the performance and life span of Cisco UCS hardware and other devices in the data center. Proper planning of power, cooling, spacing, cabling, and environmental factors will not only save money but help improve the performance, operation cost, and life cycle of your data center infrastructure. Cisco UCS hardware has been designed in the most efficient way to consume less power by reducing the number of components. Converged fabric brings fewer cables, ports, connectors, and interfaces to further reduce power and cabling requirements. The simplified design of Unified Computing System with a 63% open center plane provides better cooling without compromising the performance of servers. Using the best practices of airflow management, such as strict hot aisle and cold aisle planning, can double the cooling capacity for servers and switches in the data center. However, poor airflow management can reduce both the efficiency and capacity of the data center.

In this chapter, we will walk through the installation of UCS hardware components such as Fabric Interconnects, chassis, I/O modules, blade servers, and rack servers with the configuration required to support these devices in the data center. Additionally, we will discuss the Cisco SingleConnect technology for connecting compute servers.

The topics that will be covered in this chapter are as follows:

• UCS hardware component installation
• Rack installation for UCS components
• UCS chassis installation
• UCS blade server installation
• Fabric Interconnect installation
• Cabling—Fabric Interconnect and Fabric Extender
• Cabling—Fabric Interconnect and Nexus
• Cisco SingleConnect technology