A few years ago, we were one of the first/early adopters of UCS. At that time, it was clearly in it’s infancy and not ready for prime time, our local Cisco guys didn’t even know anything about it. If you care to read those previous posts, they can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I was fairly bitter when I wrote those, but with good reason. I ‘wasted’ a lot of time (read weeks or months) jacking with it and had nothing but problems.
I’ve been using a Cisco Cius 7″ Android tablet for several months now and am starting to have mixed emotions about it. Initially, I loved it, especially since it now has 2.2.2 (Froyo) and Google’s updated Play Store. It also allows side-loading of apps, so I have the Amazon Appstore, plus Cisco’s AppHQ. Overall, it’s fairly snappy, but is Atom-based (at 1.6GHz), so custom ROMs are pretty much non-existent.
Well, Cisco finally came with an answer to why I was able to break the stuff like clock work before, and that answer was firmware. A new firmware has been release for the chassis, blades, & FEX (and I’m sure I’ve either got that in the wrong order or hardware), but I can’t say I’m excited about it.
We set more time aside to have Cisco come in and upgrade the bits, as if we haven’t wasted enough time already. This time, they sent the big guns to work on it, or gun, rather, as they sent one of the engineers named Troy. He was a good guy, very knowledgeable, but he can’t help it that he works for Cisco, we’ve all gotta eat, right?
Okay, so now that we’ve tested different OS installations, now it’s time to test the real purpose we acquired these blades for: Virtualization
A little info on the hardware: Cisco N20-B6620-1, dual Xeon E5540s, 24GB of RAM, and two 73gb drives
We’re using VMware ESXi 4.0u1 for our testing, and booting from the SAN. Yes, I know, it’s only still experimental with vSphere, I don’t like it, but that’s the path I was lead down by my superiors.
I heard today that Cisco will no longer make their Nexus-line of switches for non-Cisco brand blade enclosures.
What does this mean exactly? Those of us with the Dell M1000e blade chassis who are currently using pass-throughs and were waiting for the promised Cisco Nexus 4000 won’t have to wait anymore because it’s NEVER coming out.
Am I the only one who thinks Cisco shot themselves in the foot by doing this?
I mean, I have hands-on experience with UCS and wouldn’t wish that evil on anyone.
*EDIT*
I just wanted to add that this affects all OEM vendors like Dell, HP, and IBM, as Cisco dropped production of new switches for other blade systems.
We were some of the earliest of ‘adopters’ for a paid POC to get the Cisco UCS system in-house.
Cisco sent the hardware & a group of techs to get this thing off the ground. Any new hardware being deployed shouldn’t require a group of people from the vendor to come out to set it up, should it? In today’s society, it should be user friendly, plug-n-play, which we all know Cisco to be, right? Heh, okay, or not, but anyway, our trouble had just begun.