Cisco on myvirtualcloud.net

Cisco Radio @ VMware vForum Brazil 2011

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:31:00 +0000

During the VMware vForum Brazil 2011 I was interviewed by Brazilian news agencies on subjects such as VDI, Cloud, EMC and VMware integration. Cisco has a local online radio with music and IT interviews.

Ask the VDI Experts: VDI Discussion with Cisco, EMC, and VMware

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:55:00 +0000

During VMworld’11 I was asked to facilitate a conversation about VDI and Cisco VXI at Cisco booth at the Solutions Exchange pavilion. I was there with Rick Kijewsky (Cisco), David Wakeman @desktopguy (VMware) and Aarun Garg (Cisco). Paul Slager from http://paulslager.com was also there for few moments.

The Right Hardware for a 10K VDI solution

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:43:00 +0000

I have been involved in many VDI designs over the past years, and recently I have been involved in a design and architecture for a 10,000 user VDI solution. I thought it would be interesting to share here the considerations and decisions that goes behind hardware definition for such a large project.

50,000-Seat VMware View 4.5 Deployment Reference Architecture

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:13:00 +0000

VMware released a 50,000-Seat VMware View Deployment Reference Architecture in partnership with NetApp, Wyse, Cisco and Fujitsu. The RA posted on NetApp blog originally in August, 2010 has now been made available at VMware website.

The scenario deploys a 50,000-seat environment on 10 NetApp FAS3170 high-availability (HA) pairs using the Network File System (NFS) protocol. A 20,000-seat deployment and six 5,000-seat regular deployments are used in this scenario.

VMware release Solution Briefs covering SSL VPN & PCoIP

Wed, 05 May 2010 14:52:00 +0000

VMware released three Solution Briefs covering SSL VPN solutions that have been tested with VMware View and PCoIP. The partners leveraging the solutions at this stage are Cisco, F5 and Juniper. More to come…

All appliances make use of SSL over UDP, and more specifically Cisco and F5 make use of dTLS (datagram TLS). I have written about it here. The appliances are Cisco ASA, F5 BIG-IP Edge Gateway and Juniper Networks SA Series.

Cisco Solutions for a VMware View 4.0 Environment Design Guide

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:32:00 +0000

Mid February Cisco released a Networking Design Guide for VMware View 4.0 authored by Shannon McFarland. Only now I was able to have a look at the document and it seems to cover a reasonable amount of Cisco components that could possible integrate in a VMware View solution.

APAC Virtualisation Podcast (Cisco UCS) – Wed 3/3/10 @ 9pm SYD

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:22:00 +0000

This week we have a special guest – Steve Chamber from Cisco and owner of viewyonder.com - to present, talk and discuss the Cisco UCS platform and how it can leverage your virtualisation infrastructure and processes.

The broadcast is via TALKSHOE.com.

UCS and UCSM Basics

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:09:54 +0000

I had this post pre-written from a while ago and was not going to publish it, but as people still ask me about UCS I decided to publish it. In few words, UCS is a BladeCenter chassis that integrates compute, networking and Storage (FCoE) at backplane level whilst adding management capabilities through UCSM (USC Manager).

CPOC – Customer Proof of Concept

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:41:00 +0000

Have you ever been to one of the Cisco Customer Proof of Concept (CPOC)? If you like fridges you will enjoy it. This is the one located in Sydney.

The video is a bit shaky but you can get the idea - several corridors like this one and if you pay attention you will see two Cisco Nexus 7000 Series and four UCS chassis fully populated. The UCS kits were deployed by me but shame on me I recorded the video with them turned off.

Additional facts or tips on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:04:00 +0000

Here are some additional interesting facts or tips to complete the excellent list already compiled by Rodney Haywood (@rodos).

Licence Numbers are specific to each physical system’s serial number.
Virtual Media Server only mount ISO/IMG files hosted locally in your workstation (no Map or FQDN).
KVM requires a valid block of IPs, even thou it’s for internal use only.
USC 6100’s cluster is Active/Passive and will not fallback automatically in case of a failure.
UCS 6100’s northbound connections to the network infrastructure are 10 GB only (1GB to be released).
SAN boot is only possible when using Menlo and Palo mezzanines cards.
B200 blades have single CNA adaptor. For redundancy B250 blades are required.
For cluster and console ETH connectors you will need cables without sleeves. See photo bellow.

VCE - Virtual Computing Environment Coalition Webcast

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:22:00 +0000

In continuation to my previous post about the VCE Coalition watch here the webcast (Introducing the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition) with John Chambers, Joe Tucci, and Paul Maritz.

Also read Acadia, Cisco, EMC, VMware: Vblock Top Three Questions by Mark Bowker

Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:34:37 +0000

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware today announced a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product, dubbed vBlock.

Think of vBlock as the plug and play data-center solution, it will consist of Cisco UCS/Nexus/MDS, EMC Storage and VMware Virtualization all within a pre-designed and built rack solution - simply drop it in your data-center, plug it in and deploy virtual machines. This is not really any different than purchasing HP Servers, NetApp Storage and VMware licenses separately. Ultimately it is the same solution, but now with a single SKU that partners will be able to sell.

What does that mean to you if your organization already have a fully deployed cloud computing environment? Probably nothing.

There is no true Stateless Computing today

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:48:00 +0000

This week randomly I found out that one of the hottest topics of the IT industry at the moment “Stateless Computing” had no reference in Wikipedia. WTF, who is updating that wiki? So, for the first time I added the term to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_Computing

UCS (Unified Computing System) Key Concepts

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:48:01 +0000

UCS (Unified Computing System) is Cisco’s first entry into the x86 server market. This paper provides insight into both the Cisco Data Centre 3.0 strategy, and UCS, which is a key enabler to DC 3.0. It discusses products within the UCS range at a component level, such as blade and rack mount server offerings, and lastly highlights some of the larger benefits that can be gained through the pairing of x86 virtualisation and UCS technology.