CCIE or Null!

Being a network engineer one of the things that I really wondered about in the UCS B Series was how exactly do those server blades talk the IOM, now from the IOM to the FI’s its relatively simple you’ve got physical cables. However within the UCS B-Series chassis there are no cable per-say within the chassis however the blades are connected by an 802.3kr Backplane Ethernet.

There are actually a few things that come into play when considering the bandwidth/connectivity between the blades in the B-Chassis such as:

• IOM Model -2104XP vs 2204XP vs 2208XP and so forth
  • The IOM Model depicts the following:
    • Number of Physical connection to the upstream FI
    • Amount of Throughput that can be carried through the chassis
    • Number of 10Gb IEEE 802.3kr connection into the Chassis
• Adapter Type – Cisco VIC 1240/1280 vs M81KR vs 3rd Party Cisco Certified Adapter vs etc
  • Affect the number of virtual interfaces
  • Determines the amount of throughput per-fabric to/from the server
• Number of adapters populated in the blades
  • Also determines the amount of throughput per fabric.

A physical representation of the connectivity:

I was able to get this info from Cisco.com, and this page has goes into detail regarding many of the different types of connectivity. It is definitely a good reference for planning out a UCS-B Series deployment. Granted this is only in regards to network connectivity and doesn’t talk about the requirements of the actual compute hardware itself.

P.S. I’ve been updating my CCIE: Data Center Study Link Page hope your still checking out!