UCS 1.4 Code: What is cool so far.

Here are a few things that have jumped out so far that I like with the 1.4 code:

— Support for the new B230 blades; half size blade with 2 sockets and 32 DIMM slots (16 cores and 256 GB memory!!)

— Able to manage the C-Series servers via UCS Manager (the rack servers)

—  Power capping to cover groups of chassis; this is very powerful now.  Think about it, you can have 4 chassis in 1 rack all sharing 2 or 4 – 220 circuits.  Now you can cap, monitor and manage the amount of power by groups of chassis not just per blade or chassis.

—  Software packaging for new server hardware that does NOT require the IO fabric upgrade to use the new servers.  Nice!

—  Bigger and Badder!  Support for up to 1024 VLANS and up to 20 UCS chassis (160 servers from 1 management point!!).

—  Fiber Channel connectivity options, now can do port channeling and FC trucking as well as some limited direct connection of FC based storage (no zoning ability . .  yet).

OK the list goes on and on, they have packed a lot into this release.

Checking out the new items in UCSM, I had to grab a few screen shots of the following:

Power!  You ever wonder how much power a server or chassis is using?  Now you know, check this out!  I am loving this.

This is cool stuff!

 

For those UCS users out there, it has not always been very clear what the impact of making various changes to a Service Profile might do to the workload.  They have improved with each release, but this is some great detail now:

Cool stuff in Cisco UCS 1.4 code, I hope to have more time to share with everyone as we continue to maximize our investment.  Time to go home . . .