Understanding Cisco Unified Computing System Service Profiles

What You Will Learn

Cisco Unified Computing System™ technology has redefined the enterprise computing environment. By breaking the

traditional model of older data centers and redefining data center infrastructure as pools of virtualized server,

storage, and network resources, the Cisco Unified Computing System has enabled a new computing model that both

delivers advantages in capital and operational cost, and does so in a manner that improves flexibility, availability,

and reduces the amount of time needed for IT to respond to business changes.

To understand how the Cisco Unified Computing System delivers these benefits, it is necessary to understand the

concept of a “service profile,” the fundamental mechanism by which the Cisco Unified Computing System models the

necessary abstractions of server, storage, and networking. This document explores the underlying structure of Cisco

Unified Computing System service profiles, explains how they are used to enable Cisco Unified Computing System

capabilities, and shows the benefits that accrue from their use.

Redefining the Server and the Data Center

The Old View: Separate Stacks, Lots of Glue

Today’s data centers are migrating from the client-server, distributed model of the past toward the more virtualized

model of the future. This steady migration is fueled by the need to conserve space and energy1, as well as a desire

to overcome the myriad problems that arise from supporting a heterogeneous data center environment:

● Complexity: Too many software and hardware vendors in the data center leads to too many conflicting

components. These incompatibilities hinder new product deployments and upgrades.

● Archaic Server Architectures: While server performance has increased dramatically, the basic architecture

of the server has not changed in decades. Each server is essentially its own management island, with local

management and settings, some of which, such as MAC addresses, are assumed to be immutable. Multiple

generations of management tools have attempted to provide a single management interface to multiple

servers to simplify the operating experience for users, but these fundamentally are still layers of tools stacked

on top of disjointed management domains. Blade servers as a product class have improved this situation, but

they still lack true management integration beyond the chassis level.

● Storage: As business applications increase in complexity, the need for larger and more reliable storage

solutions becomes a data center imperative. Storage was the first significant server resource to be shared, in

the form of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs, and today networked, shared storage is the norm in

most organizations.

● Disjointed Network, Server, and Management Domains: Even more crippling than older server

architectures from the perspective of streamlining data center operations has been the evolution of server,

storage, and networking solutions into separate technology and management silos.

● Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Data centers must maintain business processes (with limited

or no downtime) for the overall business to remain competitive.

● Inefficiency: Application slowdowns result from server and application incompatibilities, inconsistent server

policies, and poor integration of third-party hardware and software.

● Cooling: Good ventilation saves power and reduces costs. However, dense server racks make it very difficult

to keep data centers cool and hold down costs.

● Cabling: Many of today’s data centers have evolved into a complex mass of interconnected cables, further

increasing rack density and further reducing data center ventilation.

Virtual Servers: The First Abstraction

The first major breakthrough was the development of enterprise-class hypervisors for x86 systems and the common

Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems2. These hypervisors and their associated virtual servers delivered

the first building block of a virtualized data center: a server abstraction that was not bound to a physical hardware

element. With virtual machines, users could now define a server in software and deploy it anywhere in the data

center without altering any of the underlying hardware.

To understand virtual machines - and service profiles - consider how a virtual machine abstracts a server definition.

Instead of thinking of a server as a box in a rack, consider that a server is defined by the combination of the following

sets of physical resources:

● Processing Resources: CPU and memory

● Storage Bindings: Connections to external storage, which may contain the boot images, applications, etc.

Storage may also include the local disk, but as will be discussed later, this is a less effective choice except in

environments in which the boot image is almost invariant.

● Network Interfaces: Available network connections and Network Interface Cards (NICs), Host Bus Adapters

(HBAs), Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), etc.

These elements provide a model of a physical server before it is deployed: with resource entitlements and

connections to the rest of the data center, but without any personalization such as server name, MAC address, boot

parameters, Fibre Channel Worldwide Name (WWN) settings for the HBAs, etc. that change the definition from a

generic server to a specific server. This separation of definition and instantiation, and the capability to create generic

virtual machine templates, is one of the great strengths of all virtualization environments. Generalized templates can

be created, and then new servers can be created by applying a set of Unique IDs (UIDs) such as MAC addresses

and server names to the template as the server is created in the runtime environment, enabling one-to-many

deployment and drastically reducing the number of touchpoints needed to create and manage the server population.

Data Center Integration: The Missing Element

While virtual server hosts and their associated virtual machines were a major breakthrough and extremely valuable

in their own right, their success highlighted the fact that the data center still remained a world of islands, with

separate network, storage, and server technology and administration stacks. Early attempts to integrate these

separate operational spheres were coarse-grained attempts to join dissimilar management consoles together under

a set of menus with a common look and feel. Tools were usually from different code bases and often from multiple

original manufacturers, and the differences were readily apparent to most users. Little real integration was achieved,

and despite more than a decade of progress, promises, and products, integrated management remains an elusive

goal.

Despite this relative lack of success, the vendor community as a whole has not ignored this combined problem and

opportunity, and users today have at least 200 products to choose from that purport to offer benefits in managing

some aspects of the combined storage, server, and networking environments. Some of them are very capable within

their domains, but none are truly integrated, with an integrated data abstraction and a common code base of

management software that spans the entire server, storage, and network fabric. Further, integration of these tools

often remains an exercise left to the user. Additionally, true hardware independence is difficult to achieve, and

collections of loosely coupled tools are subject to errors such as race conditions when data center operators attempt

to perform large numbers of asynchronous operations. However, the technology exists today to merge servers,

networks, and storage into a single integrated environment with an integrated management platform - but it requires

a new converged fabric architecture that removes the old separations between these domains.

To meet this challenge, Cisco introduced the Cisco Unified Computing System, the first commercially available

system that delivers an integrated management model that spans server, storage, and networking as well as

hardware designed to take advantage of its innovations. The following sections provide an overview of the basic

functions of the Cisco Unified Computing System along with the details of the Cisco Unified Computing System

service profiles, the underlying abstraction model that is central to Cisco Unified Computing System.

Cisco Unified Computing System Overview

The Cisco Unified Computing System integrates low-latency, unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-based

servers, creating an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified

management domain. A single system can scale across multiple chassis and thousands of virtual machines3

(Figure 1).

The approach of the Cisco Unified Computing System enables data center servers to become stateless and fungible,

where the server’s identity (using MAC or WWN addressing or UIDs) as well as build and operational policy

information such as firmware and BIOS revisions and network and storage connectivity profiles can be dynamically

provisioned or migrated to any physical server in the system. The Cisco Unified Computing System integrates server

management with network and storage resources to meet the rapidly changing needs in today’s data centers. New

computing resources can be deployed “just in time.” Traditional physical and virtual workloads can be easily

migrated between servers through remote management, regardless of physical connectivity. The Cisco Unified

Computing System directly improves capital utilization and operational cost and enables gains in availability,

security, agility, and performance through an integrated architecture.

The Cisco Unified Computing System currently supports older dedicated OS environments (Microsoft Windows and

multiple versions of Linux) as well as both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors and maintains a high level of

integration with their respective vendors’ management stacks. It is also designed to readily integrate with third-party

software and user management tools. In addition to its own Command-Line Interface (CLI) and internal XML

interfaces, the Cisco Unified Computing System supports a wide variety of interfaces to external systems, including

Common Information Model (CIM) XML; Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH)

Command Line Protocol (CLP); Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP); Intelligent Platform Management

Interface (IPMI); remote Keyboard, Video, and Mouse (KVM); and Serial over LAN (SoL).

Service Profiles: Cisco Unified Computing System Foundation Technology

What Is a Service Profile?

Conceptually, a service profile is an extension of the virtual machine abstraction applied to physical servers. The

definition has been expanded to include elements of the environment that span the entire data center, encapsulating

the server identity (LAN and SAN addressing, I/O configurations, firmware versions, boot order, network VLAN,

physical port, and quality-of-service [QoS] policies) in logical “service profiles” that can be dynamically created and

associated with any physical server in the system within minutes rather than hours or days. The association of

service profiles with physical servers is performed as a simple, single operation. It enables migration of identities

between servers in the environment without requiring any physical configuration changes and facilitates rapid baremetal

provisioning of replacements for failed servers.

Service profiles also include operational policy information, such as information about firmware versions.

This highly dynamic environment can be adapted to meet rapidly changing needs in today’s data centers with just-intime

deployment of new computing resources and reliable movement of traditional and virtual workloads. Data center

administrators can now focus on addressing business policies and data access on the basis of application and

service requirements, rather than physical server connectivity and configurations.

Service profiles can be abstracted from the specifics of a given server to create a service profile template, which

defines policies that can be applied any number of times to provision any number of servers. Service profile

templates help enable large-scale operations in which many servers are provisioned as easily as a single server.

In addition, using service profiles, Cisco® UCS Manager provides logical grouping capabilities for both physical

servers and service profiles and their associated templates. This pooling or grouping, combined with fine-grained

role-based access, allows businesses to treat a farm of compute blades as a flexible resource pool that can be

reallocated in real time to meet their changing needs, while maintaining any organizational overlay on the

environment that they want. Figure 2 shows the major elements of a service profile.

Another way to understand the concept of service profiles is by looking at their configuration points: the aspects of

the Cisco Unified Computing System that they control. Figure 3 shows the most significant configuration points for

Cisco Unified Computing System service profiles.

The service profile components define the server environment, including the local server settings plus storage (SAN)

settings such as VSAN specifications and complete network settings such as uplink, VLAN and QoS settings.

Service profiles themselves are built on policies: administrator-defined sets of rules and operating characteristics.

These policies are low-level objects in the Cisco Unified Computing System management model, and after they have

been defined, they can be reused multiple times to build service profiles. Examples of policies include:

● SoL: Defines the behavior of a virtualized serial line over the LAN

● Firmware: Enables the specification of firmware updates, including a backup firmware version as well as a

current version; one of the most powerful of the Cisco Unified Computing System abstractions. (To learn

more, see Achieve Automated, End-to-End Firmware Management with Cisco UCS Manager)

● IPMI: Defines the IPMI behavior of the system

● Stats: Controls the way system data is collected

● BIOS: Controls the BIOS versions and parameters

● Boot Policy: Establishes boot paths and order

● Local Disk Configuration: Defines the configuration of any local storage

Policies are an underlying mechanism for propagating changes across the system. When a policy is changed, this

change propagates to all service policies that use it, and any servers requiring a reboot are flagged. The major

exception to immediate policy execution is firmware policy, which stages the new firmware and applies it either at

reboot or upon administrator command. The ability of Cisco UCS Manager to apply these policy updates at reboot

has significant operational implications. With the Cisco Unified Computing System, servers with incorrect revisions of

firmware, for example, will be forced into compliance automatically at boot, or a new policy specifying a new firmware

release can be selectively applied to groups of servers under operator control. In all cases, the firmware update

process has transactional semantics and will either be completed correctly or rolled back to a previous state,

avoiding messy partial completion scenarios.

Service Profiles and Templates

Cisco Unified Computing System service profiles are a powerful tool for streamlining the management of modern

data centers. They provide a mechanism for rapidly provisioning servers and their associated network and storage

connections with consistency in all details of the environment, and they can be set up in advance of the physical

installation of the servers, which is extremely useful in most organizations. They also enable new operational policies

for high availability, since a service profile can be applied to a spare server in another rack or blade slot in the event

of a server failure, or the profile can be applied to a bare-metal replacement in the failed unit physical slot. However,

these basic service profile use cases show only a small fraction of the power and utility of service profiles and

primarily provide a transition methodology as users transition from older operating processes to new processes that

fully utilize the capabilities of the Cisco Unified Computing System.

The real power of the service profile becomes evident in templates. A service profile template parameterizes the

UIDs that differentiate one instance of an otherwise identical server from another. Templates can be categorized into

two types: initial and updating.

● Initial Template: The initial template is used to create a new server from a service profile with UIDs, but after

the server is deployed, there is no linkage between the server and the template, so changes to the template

will not propagate to the server, and all changes to items defined by the template must be made individually

to each server deployed with the initial template.

● Updating Template: An updating template maintains a link between the template and the deployed servers,

and changes to the template (most likely to be firmware revisions) cascade to the servers deployed with that

template on a schedule determined by the administrator.

Service profiles, templates, and other management data is stored in high-speed persistent storage on the Cisco

Unified Computing System fabric interconnects, with mirroring between fault-tolerant pairs of fabric interconnects.

Service Profile Lifecycle

Since service profiles can be used to create templates, and templates can be used to create service profiles, which

are then associated with a set of resources, including physical servers, to create a running server, their lifecycle is

complicated. The lifecycle of a service profile starts with its creation4. Service profiles can be created in several

ways:

● Manually: Create a new service profile using the Cisco UCS Manager GUI.

● From a Template: Create a service policy from a template.

● By Cloning: Cloning a service profile creates a replica of a service profile. Cloning is equivalent to creating a

template from the service policy and then creating a service policy from that template to associate with a

server.

Service Profiles and System Deployment

The most common use of a template after it has been defined is to deploy new applications on a fabric of underlying

physical servers, storage solutions, and networks.

A template, either initial or updating, can be used to generate either a single instance or multiple instances of its

underlying server definition, each with a different UID. This capability is one of the most powerful features of service

profiles and is the underlying mechanism that enables organizations to use the Cisco Unified Computing System to

scale a workload to meet demand, deploy large numbers of servers in a fabric, deploy an instance of a complex

application that spans multiple servers in a distributed environment, and deploy other similarly powerful applications.

Whether using simple service profiles or service profile templates, Cisco Unified Computing System users can

deploy service profiles and templates for servers and applications in several ways:

● Manually: Uses UIDs supplied by the server administrator at deployment time; this is the approach generally

used when service profiles are used in a standalone manner rather than as templates

● Automatically: Uses UIDs generated by the template at runtime; names are in the form <Name_NN>, where

NN is a sequence number generated by the deployment engine, and MAC address, WWN, etc. is chosen

from the available resource pools according to defined policy

● Programmatically: Controlled by external software though the available Cisco Unified Computing System

interfaces

Service Profiles and Cost Savings

Service profiles, particularly when set up as updating templates, have powerful capabilities that yield immediate and

measurable benefits to data center operations. The capability to stage firmware updates to an updating template and

then trigger a bulk update of all systems associated with that template provides fast updates at nearly no labor cost,

and because the entire update cycle is transactional on a per-server basis, the updates will either be completed

correctly or rolled back to the initial state - a feature that prevents the extremely challenging scenario of only partially

successful updates.

The financial effect on operations is straightforward, valuable, and easy to measure:

● Reduced Labor Cost: Most operations can be performed more quickly by staff with lower skill levels. Cisco

UCS Manager provides granular, role-based privileges to allow delegated authority to, for example, deploy

but not change a template. Delegation can be implemented along organization boundaries as well as by

privilege.

● Reduced Error Rate: Most organizations are hesitant to discuss error rates and their consequences, both for

proprietary reasons and to avoid exposure to potential liability, but the limited available data as well as a rich

store of anecdotal data suggests that the error rate for CLI operations is somewhere in the range of 1 to 3

percent, with a wide range of recovery times and costs. Cisco Unified Computing System service policies and

templates should be able to reduce the error rate effectively to zero, decreasing costs, reducing disruptions,

and freeing time for more valuable activities.

● Simplification of Tool Portfolio: The combined capabilities of Cisco UCS Manager and templates may allow

the elimination of third-party firmware management tools.

Service profiles, in combination with the stateless nature of Cisco Unified Computing System servers, provide the

underlying mechanism that allows the use of a common pool of spare servers that can be quickly repurposed for

nearly any requirement. For most organization and applications, this feature can result in an immediate reduction in

capital expenditures (CapEx) because required spare and overflow capacity can be shared among multiple

departments and applications, as shown in Figure 5. Users can tailor the cost and acceptable risk by varying the size

of these shared resource pools.

Additional CapEx benefits are inherent in the converged fabric architecture of the Cisco Unified Computing System.

While service profiles provide definite CapEx advantages, it is in the ongoing management of complex data centers

that the cost benefits of the Cisco Unified Computing System and service profiles are most evident. Ongoing

operating expenses (OpEx) for previously deployed applications can be roughly categorized into three types of costs:

maintenance (primarily firmware updates and application and OS patches); moves, additions, and requests; and

exception conditions such as system failure and the need to add capacity.

In addition, Cisco UCS Manager, through its use of service profiles, enables the streamlining of many routine

maintenance operations.

While each customer environment is unique, customers are reporting CapEx reductions of 20 percent or more, and

OpEx reductions in a wider range, depending on how aggressively they move to take advantage of advanced

features of the Cisco Unified Computing System, including templates5.

Service Profiles and Compliance

Service profiles aid in demonstrating operational controls to meet any compliance reporting requirements. Combined

with the rich suite of Cisco network compliance and reporting tools and third-party tools from vendors such as BMC

BladeLogic Server Automation Suite, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and others, service profiles support a

comprehensive reporting and compliance program.

In addition, the Cisco Unified Computing System eliminates configuration drift, one of the most pernicious problems

in large-enterprise management, since noncompliant changes to configurations cannot be made. Today, many

companies use a combination of third-party discovery and configuration management reporting tools to monitor

configuration drift. With Cisco Unified Computing System, this expense and process is eliminated.

Cisco Unified Computing System Compared to Competitors

When a new technology category is emerging, users often have difficulty determining the validity of seemingly

conflicting claims from competing vendors.

Multiple vendors claim capabilities similar to those of the Cisco Unified Computing System: solutions that purport to

offer an integrated environment that presents a virtualized pool of resources to the data center with capabilities for

flexible deployment. While many of these tools are quite capable within limited subdomains of the data center

infrastructure, all suffer from one or more major shortcomings, including:

● Multiple Products: Most of these solutions are in fact a collection of products, with the appearance of

integration provided by a common console from which the tools for the various products are invoked.

● Old Code Bases: A solution may offer a visually appealing interface with a good presentation of required

functions, but the worst problems with some of these tools are not readily visible to the user at first glance,

since they have to do with the provenance of the software code base. Some products on the market today

are composed of major subsystems from multiple lineages and different code bases, some more than a

decade old and most developed by different teams at different times, and sometimes in different companies.

This development history has significant repercussions for the solution’s reliability and the speed with which

the vendor can add new features to the solution.

● Poor Integration: Reflecting the varied origins of the technology base, integration of the various functional

modules is often incomplete, resulting in such complexities as the need to switch between multiple

subconsoles to perform specific management tasks, often those involving storage and networks and

deployment. Perhaps the strongest indication of the unintegrated nature of some products is that some

components still have separate licensing. Another common practice is to extend the management scope

beyond the core infrastructure and to include additional features that overlap the major hypervisor features.

Cisco Unified Computing System customers providing feedback about virtual machine management have

unanimously favored retaining their vendor-specific management tools to manage their virtual machines, and

they have no desire to add a less-functional, lower-performance management tool from another vendor to

their portfolio.

● Weak Service Profile Equivalent: Some vendors can manage WWN and MAC addresses, but no product

on the market today offers the equivalent of Cisco Unified Computing System service profiles, with their

capability to span server, storage, and network configuration elements, and with their advanced policy

features. In almost all cases, the scope of the management domain stops at the server edge and does not

extend to the surrounding network.

● No Converged Fabric Storage Integration: Cisco is unique in its management of converged fabric

environments. Other vendors offer converged fabric capabilities in their system, but have gaps in the

integration of these capabilities into their management stacks.

Cisco Unified Computing System and Cost Benefits

Technology for technology’s sake is not Cisco’s business, and when we designed Cisco Unified Computing System,

it was with a clear set of customer benefits in mind. By providing a virtualized environment and an integrated

management and operations environment, our customers are able to reduce IT costs and improve profitability, as

well as the agility of the overall business as it responds to competitive forces and new market opportunities.

Reduced Costs

In most organizations and deployments, Cisco has observed total CapEx saving of more than 20 percent from the

combination of reduced server count and efficiencies inherent in the Cisco Unified Computing System solution’s

converged fabric architecture.

Likewise, ongoing OpEx is reduced by the advanced one-to-many deployment and management capabilities of the

Cisco Unified Computing System, lowering labor expenses, allowing cleaner separation of management roles, and

reducing errors.

The money saved in both CapEx and OpEx can be applied as corporate policy dictates. It can be applied to other IT

initiatives or allocated to other corporate functions, or it can flow to profits. Corporate management is in charge,

instead of being bound by old-technology cost curves.

Agility and Opportunity

With rare exceptions, business today depends on IT, and in some industries, IT is the business. By providing an

environment that allows rapid deployment and reconfiguration and enforces standardization, Cisco is providing a

substrate upon which the business can rapidly implement new solutions to address both competitive pressures and

new opportunities. The multiple-month process for deploying a new application on older data center infrastructure

can be reduced to hours or minutes with Cisco Unified Computing System, removing a major impediment to

innovation.