Now that we have our system up to date with the latest software, we can start configuring the different templates, pools, and policies. The UCS is a stateless system, meaning that you will be able to abstract all the usual properties (UUID, MAC Address, etc…) into a Service Profile and apply those to any compatible hardware.

• Create a Sub-Organization:  this step is recommended for multitenant implementations, it doesn’t hurt to make it the standard installation procedure. Right-Click on Sub-Organization to open the Create Organization window.

• Create the UUID Pool: select the Server Tab, select Pools from the drop down menu, expand the Sub-Organizations and expand the new Sub-Organization (in this case Sub-Org-01). Select the UUID Suffix Pools and click Add.

• Type in a name and select Sequential, then click Next

• Click Add to define the value

• Change one digit to make it unique and add in a decent size to configure it once and forget about it. the click Finish and click OK in the resulting pop-up window.

• Create an IP address pool: this pool will be used to connect to the KVM for console access. First, navigate to the LAN tab and select Pools from the drop down menu, then under the Sub-Organization (Sub-Org-01 in this case) right click and select Create IP Pool.

• Give at name, select Sequential and click Next

• Click Add to define the IP address block.

• Setup the IP address block information, you can do as many as you want, you can always add later, I usually configure one for each blade at the very beginning ad forget about it.

• As a final step, click Next and then click Finish (assuming you won’t use IPv6).

• Create a Server Pool: from the Servers tab, navigate to the Sub-Organization and with a right-click select Create Server Pool. Once there type in a name for the pool and click Next.

• Select the blades and servers from the left pane and add them to the Pooled Servers pane, and click Finish.

• Create the MAC Address Pools: We could use the default pool, or we can get very creative with this, especially if you are using VMware or any other host with multiple vNICs. The trick here is to Identify the FI, chassis, site, etc.

The MAC address is going to be of the format 00:25:B5:00:00:00, the first part
(00:25:B5) is the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) and the second part
(00:00:00) id the Device ID, and the second part is the one that we customize.

Is with the second part that we will get creative. Use it to identify the site and FI, and I go even further and if the deployment is small I also identify the vSwitch. For example 00:25:B5:1A:00:00 could be Site 1, FI A, vSwitch 0, and the last three places are for sequential values. Check the following image with a few MAC Pools.

 

In the previous image, you can see separate sets for management, vMotion, iSCSI, and VM traffic. You don’t have to do it exactly as I have it there, maybe you want to use the same vSwitch for management and vMotion, then you could designate one place as the vmk# for example. The next slideshow has the MAC Pool creation process.

 

I am going to submit this post the way I have it up to this point and then release the next steps including:

Create WWNN and WWPN pools (if you are using FC).

Create VLANs.

Create Policies.

Create vNIC and vHBA templates.

Create a Service Profile Template.

Deploy Service Profiles from the Service Profile Template.

Configure Especial Cases like Layer-2 Disjoint Networks