Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
It all depends on the layer 8 of your environment and the size of your environment. If your environment is more than say 3-4 physical servers, then I would make a push for UCSM (UCS Manager). I think a compelling case could be made for the virtual san stuff that Brian mentioned coupled with UCS Fabric Interconnects and C-series with single connect (vic 1225 cards). Cons: Cost of Fabric Interconnects Pros: Ease of Management vSAN is under your control just like local disks Flexibility of shared storage 2-4 10gb uplinks instead of 4-6 per physical server. Centralized Management platform I personally am not a big fan of the TRCs for larger installs, as the TRC’s limit flexibility which is sometimes needed. Booting esxi via flash card is not supported under TRC, but under spec’s based is. However, despite my dislike UCS C-series server sprawl, that is the most common option deployed today. UCS-mini does bring a lot of cool options with it too. I have never touched a UCS mini. I contend you could create a RAID 5 or 6 array on SSD’s and never ever have to worry about IOPS again. Dennis Heim | Emerging Technology Architect (Collaboration) World Wide Technology, Inc. | +1 314-212-1814 [twitter]https://twitter.com/CollabSensei [chat]xmpp:dennis.h...@wwt.com[Phone]tel:+13142121814[video]sip:dennis.h...@wwt.com Innovation happens on project squared -- http://www.projectsquared.comhttp://www.projectsquared.com/ Click here to join me in my Collaboration Meeting Roomhttps://wwt.webex.com/meet/dennis.heim From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-boun...@puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Brian Meade Sent: Monday, March 30, 2015 11:16 AM To: Scott Voll Cc: cisco-voip@puck.nether.net Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC C series with local storage is definitely the most popular for UC. If you still want enterprise storage features, Nutanix has a nice solution for utilizing your local storage- http://urns.com/blog/2014/12/nutanix-and-uc-part-1-introduction-and-overview/ On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Scott Voll svoll.v...@gmail.commailto:svoll.v...@gmail.com wrote: What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.netmailto:cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
Scott, (Disclaimer: I work for Nutanix now) The specs based server support as documented on the Cisco DocWiki gives a world of flexibility when choosing infrastructure. A hyperconverged solution like Nutanix that Brian mentioned could provide a lot of the benefits of shared storage while serving hot data from a local flash and memory tier to provide blazing fast storage performance. It would eliminate the SAN controller bottleneck you mentioned. Each Nutanix node is a local storage controller. We've had Nutanix customers provisioning Cisco UC (and contact center) clusters with stellar performance. Take a look at some blog posts I wrote as well as a best practices guide for Cisco UC on Nutanix: Best Practices Guide with example deployments: http://go.nutanix.com/bpg-cisco-unified-communications.html Personal blog posts: http://urns.com/blog/2014/12/nutanix-and-uc-part-1-introduction-and-overview/ http://urns.com/blog/2015/01/nutanix-and-uc-part-2-cisco-virtualization-requirements/ http://urns.com/blog/2015/01/nutanix-and-uc-part-3-cisco-uc-on-nutanix/ http://urns.com/blog/2015/02/nutanix-and-uc-part-4-vm-placement-and-system-sizing/ On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 3:49 AM, Heim, Dennis dennis.h...@wwt.com wrote: It all depends on the layer 8 of your environment and the size of your environment. If your environment is more than say 3-4 physical servers, then I would make a push for UCSM (UCS Manager). I think a compelling case could be made for the virtual san stuff that Brian mentioned coupled with UCS Fabric Interconnects and C-series with single connect (vic 1225 cards). Cons: Cost of Fabric Interconnects Pros: Ease of Management vSAN is under your control just like local disks Flexibility of shared storage 2-4 10gb uplinks instead of 4-6 per physical server. Centralized Management platform I personally am not a big fan of the TRCs for larger installs, as the TRC’s limit flexibility which is sometimes needed. Booting esxi via flash card is not supported under TRC, but under spec’s based is. However, despite my dislike UCS C-series server sprawl, that is the most common option deployed today. UCS-mini does bring a lot of cool options with it too. I have never touched a UCS mini. I contend you could create a RAID 5 or 6 array on SSD’s and never ever have to worry about IOPS again. *Dennis Heim | Emerging Technology Architect (Collaboration)* World Wide Technology, Inc. | +1 314-212-1814 [image: twitter] https://twitter.com/CollabSensei [image: chat][image: Phone] +13142121814[image: video] Innovation happens on project squared -- http://www.projectsquared.com *Click here to join me in my Collaboration Meeting Room https://wwt.webex.com/meet/dennis.heim* *From:* cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-boun...@puck.nether.net] *On Behalf Of *Brian Meade *Sent:* Monday, March 30, 2015 11:16 AM *To:* Scott Voll *Cc:* cisco-voip@puck.nether.net *Subject:* Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC C series with local storage is definitely the most popular for UC. If you still want enterprise storage features, Nutanix has a nice solution for utilizing your local storage- http://urns.com/blog/2014/12/nutanix-and-uc-part-1-introduction-and-overview/ On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Scott Voll svoll.v...@gmail.com wrote: What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
[cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
I can tell you it is a lot easier to get through A2Q when you aren’t dealing with network attached storage. The costs will be higher for a ucs C series chassis because it is an all in one server unlike the blades. I prefer UCS-C series typically because I don’t have to depend on a network team that might or might not know what they are doing. On the other hand if you already have a SAN setup and running the old environment it could be more cost effective to upgrade that than put in a new C series setup. In the B environments I have worked with I usually have a lot more communication going on between the various teams that support it as in many cases the network storage is used for all kinds of things within an environment. This can go either way ultimately it is about requirements. Thank you, Brian From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-boun...@puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Scott Voll Sent: Monday, March 30, 2015 11:43 AM To: cisco-voip@puck.nether.net Subject: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
I'm going to be suggesting rack mount C series to my manager at this time, for a number of reasons. We have two data centres, so I have to split the equipment over two locations. Putting a full fledged B series solution would be cost prohibitive. Plus, I like that the C series has local storage. At the last CiscoLive I heard quite a few issues getting remote storage working properly and keeping it working properly. The calculations they presented to ensure it would work was like a first year calculus class. What I was hoping was that the UCSExpress module would be TRC approved at some point so we could run a few of those, but after finding out about how each server in the cluster has to be the same specs (still not sure why) not sure if that will fly in our environment. Lelio P.S. I'm not sure vMotion is fully supported within UC on UCS. I've read a few things on the list that seem to point to shutdown/copy/move only. --- Lelio Fulgenzi, B.A. Senior Analyst, Network Infrastructure Computing and Communications Services (CCS) University of Guelph 519‐824‐4120 Ext 56354 le...@uoguelph.ca www.uoguelph.ca/ccs Room 037, Animal Science and Nutrition Building Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1 - Original Message - From: Scott Voll svoll.v...@gmail.com To: cisco-voip@puck.nether.net Sent: Monday, March 30, 2015 11:42:49 AM Subject: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
Re: [cisco-voip] Hardware for UC
C series with local storage is definitely the most popular for UC. If you still want enterprise storage features, Nutanix has a nice solution for utilizing your local storage- http://urns.com/blog/2014/12/nutanix-and-uc-part-1-introduction-and-overview/ On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Scott Voll svoll.v...@gmail.com wrote: What hardware is everyone using to upgrade there UC enviroment to? We have UCS Blades with netapp storage, but have had some limitations on IO (prior to the upgraded controllers) that I'm a little concerned about. I like the idea of vmotion. But I'm thinking if it's my back side on the line with my UC environment, Maybe the rack mount UCS might be a better bet? We (UC Team) have also been thinking about the UCS mini with storage blade. What our others doing? What is Cisco suggesting these days? Thanks Scott ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip ___ cisco-voip mailing list cisco-voip@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
