You can do what to what, say what?

You can do what to what, say what?

I was chatting with an ex-colleague last night and he asked a great, “I’m new to UCS” question: if UCS is “designed for virtualization” then does it only work for virtualization?

If that smart cookie is thinking that question, then I’m sure that lots more people are.    Maybe it’s a sign that the marketing is working :)

This is a very valid question, especially because we all talk about UCS being “stateless”.  Stateless  means having no persistent configuration.  A UCS blade can be stateless, but it doesn’t have to be :)   Stateless can mean that the blade boots from SAN; Stateful means that the blade boots from local SAS drives.

This is a combined question around virtualization and stateless computing, so let’s answer it in two parts: what can you install, and how is it installed?

Checkout the Cisco UCS Manager GUI Configuration Guide – it has a section on OS Installation starting on page 237.

What can be installed: Supported Operating Systems for Cisco UCS

First, you can install the following supported operating systems on a UCS blade:

  1. Microsoft Windows Server 2008
  2. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2
  3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
  4. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
  5. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
  6. VMware vSphere 4
  7. VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4

How is it installed: Installation method and destination

You can only install an OS over the network, and you have two options:

  1. Via the VirtualMedia CDROM (available via the KVM console – Keyboard, Video, Mouse)
  2. Via Virtual USB (available via the KVM dongle – physically attached to the chassis)
  3. Via Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE boot)

The targets for the installation can be one of three:

  1. Local SAS drives – but this defeats the statelessness
  2. SAN LUN - this is stateless and needs boot from SAN
  3. RAM - installing things like Linux Knoppix and ESXi into memory – truly stateless

So you have nine different options for installation, but in an enterprise you will want to use your favourite automation tool to do all of this for you.

We recommend BMC Bladelogic, but your mileage may vary :)

Related posts:

  1. Cisco UCS and vSphere Management: Inside, or outside?
  2. Cisco UCS: different workload, different configuration, same blade. Simple.
  3. Intel, UCS and vSphere: 10 advances since 2005, and why they matter