Cisco Unified Computing System Express

Simplifying Branch-Office Infrastructure

The Cisco Unified Computing System^™ Express (UCS Express) is a converged computing, virtualization, and networking platform for hosting essential infrastructure services and mission-critical business applications in the lean branch office.

It consists of the following:

●   Cisco^® Services-Ready Engine (SRE) x86 blade server computing platform (Figure 1)

●   Cisco Services-Ready Engine Virtualization (SRE-V) server virtualization platform powered by VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi)

●   Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2) networking platform with Multigigabit Fabric (MGF) backplane switch

●   Cisco Integrated Management Controller Express (IMC Express) blade management system

Cisco UCS Express is best suited for multisite organizations with centralized IT infrastructure that need to host applications locally in the branch office because of performance, availability, or compliance reasons. It enables multiple virtual instances of Microsoft Windows Server and Linux to run on dedicated general-purpose x86 blades directly in the Cisco ISR G2 chassis. With Cisco UCS Express, multisite organizations can increase IT agility, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and get more value out of their branch-office infrastructure.

Infrastructure Challenges at the Branch Office

Organizations today are turning to centralization of branch-office applications to reduce the cost and complexity of their remote IT systems. As a result, branch-office infrastructure - servers, storage devices, and infrastructure software - is being displaced by much more optimized infrastructure in the data center.

Although full application centralization is the ideal scenario for all organizations, in practice it is often difficult to achieve. Typically, the WAN separates the end user in the branch office from the application processing environment in the data center. However, the WAN has several inherent limitations that affect the quality of the user’s experience with remote applications. Moreover, applications may not be able to store data outside the branch office because of privacy or access-control concerns. Therefore, some applications still cannot leave the branch office for one or a combination of the following reasons:

●   Performance: Applications that cannot tolerate the latency and bandwidth limitations of a WAN link because they require fast response times may need local processing to meet their performance targets.

●   Availability: Applications that cannot tolerate the reliability and congestion limitations of a WAN link because they require maximum uptime may need local survivability to meet their availability targets.

●   Compliance: Applications that cannot store their data outside the branch office because they must meet user privacy, regulatory, or internal policy requirements may require local presence to comply.

The following are examples of applications that have defied most centralization efforts and continue to be deployed locally at the edge of the network:

●   Core Microsoft Windows services: Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and Microsoft Windows print services, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, Domain Name System (DNS) server, file services, and others.

●   Mission-critical business applications: Point-of-sale (POS) systems, bank teller in-office control points (IOCP), electronic-medical-record (EMR) systems, inventory management systems, and others.

●   Client management services: Configuration and operations management, monitoring services, update and patching services, backup and recovery services, terminal server gateways, and others.

Most of these mission-critical WAN edge services require modest hardware resources. Therefore, the now-leaner branch office typically requires a small number of physical servers for hosting all local applications. Moreover, centrally hosted applications can now perform with LAN-like speed over the WAN by taking advantage of WAN optimization and application acceleration. All these factors have contributed to the emergence of the lean branch-office architecture.

The Lean Branch Office

The reduction of branch-office applications to the essential minimum, modest local hardware requirements, and WAN optimization technologies reduce the branch-office infrastructure footprint, equipment and operating costs, and management complexity. The resulting lean branch office provides a balance between a fully centralized serverless architecture with its dependence on a slow and unreliable WAN link and a distributed full-service architecture with its high cost and management complexity, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1.       Comparison of Branch-Office Architectures

The lean branch office:

●   Fully relies on the WAN link to deliver most applications from the data center

●   Locally hosts essential infrastructure services and mission-critical business applications

●   Typically needs a small number of physical servers for local applications and services

●   Provides low cost and simplicity for the applications that can be centralized into the data center

●   Offers performance and availability guarantees for the applications that are critical to the business

Today you have many options for building and operating a lean branch-office infrastructure. However, most of these options lead to unnecessary complexity and costs. The following sections summarize the top challenges stemming from the use of typical infrastructure building blocks available today.

Physical Servers

A typical lean branch office runs five or six of the previously mentioned services and applications. They can be provisioned in several ways:

●   Dedicated physical server for each application: This setup isolates applications from each other for organizational, security, performance, or application availability reasons. However, it increases equipment and operating costs.

●   Multiple applications share one physical server: This setup reduces costs, but it creates access control, organizational coordination, application availability, and time-to-deployment complexity.

Converting physical servers to virtual servers and running them on top of a virtualized platform offers the best of both scenarios while reducing costs. Each application is assigned to a dedicated virtual server, and all virtual servers are hosted on one or two physical servers.

Server Form Factors

A typical lean branch office has several server form-factor options, including:

●   Tower servers: This setup provides a general-purpose platform for a wide variety of applications, but it creates complex, hardwired infrastructure that is costly to build and modify. Short product lifecycles require frequent replacements that often result in overprovisioned and underused systems.

●   WAN optimization appliances: Dedicated partitions on WAN optimization devices host lightweight virtualized applications, but the small amount of available hardware resources limits the scalability and the type of branch-office applications that can be hosted.

Using the x86 blade server computing platform provides the best of both scenarios while reducing costs. Blade servers provide a general-purpose platform, share common components, are energy efficient, and offer easy hardware provisioning with remote management.

Device Sprawl

Today branch-office infrastructure is divided between networking devices and servers. This setup leads to redundancies and device sprawl, and it creates several challenges, including:

●   Proliferation of wires and components: Maintaining unconsolidated infrastructure leads to excess wires, ports, and cooling; extra physical space; and other redundancies, ultimately leading to a higher TCO.

●   High-touch, hardwired infrastructure: Physical cabling creates an infrastructure in the remote office that requires modification through costly onsite visits.

Housing all network devices and servers in a single chassis and using a network platform to connect and integrate the various elements replaces a physically wired infrastructure with one that is soft-wired and remotely manageable.

Cisco UCS Express addresses all these lean branch-office challenges by providing a converged computing, virtualization, and networking platform.

Product Description

Cisco UCS Express is a platform for hosting essential infrastructure services and mission-critical business applications in the lean branch office. It consists of three platforms:

●   Network platform: Servers and network devices can be housed under one chassis - the Cisco ISR G2. A multigigabit backplane switch directly connects the different components together without any need for physical wires.

●   Computing platform: The x86 blade server - the form factor favored in data centers - is available to small and medium-sized branch offices and can be housed in the most widely deployed branch-office device, the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR).

●   Virtualization platform: A joint Cisco and VMware solution that provides a bare-metal hypervisor for the branch office enables consolidation of physical servers.

Although the physical infrastructure has been converged, the management of each platform has not. The same familiar tools used to manage the different functional domains - servers, virtualization, and network with their separated access control - are used to manage Cisco UCS Express.

Cisco UCS Express consists of several components, shown in Figure 2.

Integrated Network Platform

Cisco ISR G2 functions as a blade-server enclosure for Cisco UCS Express. The Cisco ISR is one of the most widely deployed branch-office devices, and it already has slots for various networking modules, as shown in Figure 3. Now you can reuse the same slots for x86 blade servers. Moreover, the Cisco ISR G2 provides a comprehensive portfolio of branch-office services: network connectivity, security, wireless mobility, WAN optimization, unified communications, and application integration. Combined with Cisco UCS Express, the Cisco ISR G2 is the only networking platform on the market that provides all branch-office services integrated into a single device.

The MGF backplane switch connects the virtual network across multiple hypervisors and allows direct access to the LAN either through the Cisco EtherSwitch^® enhanced high-speed WAN interface cards (EHWICs) or Cisco EtherSwitch service modules, shown in Figure 4, without sending the traffic through the router CPU. The Cisco EtherSwitch modules are not required for Cisco UCS Express; however, they simplify configuration and improve performance. Cisco IOS^® Software provides Inter-VLAN routing and other Layer 3 features to hypervisor networks. Figure 5 shows possible MGF use cases.

x86 Blade Server Computing Platform

Cisco UCS Express takes advantage of x86 server features offered by the SRE blades (Figure 6). Cisco SRE blades have their own processors, storage, network interfaces, and memory that operate independently of the host router resources, helping ensure optimal concurrent routing and application performance. The blades have lower energy consumption, shipping weight, physical size, wiring, and cabling than typical tower servers. Cisco SRE blades provide simple and fast hardware provisioning that nontechnical branch-office employees can perform. In addition, Cisco SRE provides on-demand application deployment with the capability to remotely provision the Cisco SRE virtualization platform on the blade at any time.

Cisco ISR G2 routers provide the Cisco SRE blades with power, cooling, and backplane switch integration as in a typical blade-server chassis. Each Cisco SRE blade is connected to the router by two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, as shown in Figure 7. One is a Layer 2 interface that connects the blade directly to the MGF backplane switch; it is used for virtual server traffic. The other is a Layer 3 interface that connects the blade to the Cisco ISR G2 route engine; it is used for management traffic. The third external Gigabit Ethernet port is provided for redundancy and other uses.

Bare-Metal Hypervisor Virtualization Platform

Cisco has joined with VMware to create the Cisco SRE Virtualization (SRE-V) platform - the VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) optimized for the SRE blades. Cisco SRE-V is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the SRE hardware. The hypervisor provides virtual hardware containers for hosting applications and operating systems (virtual servers), as shown in Figure 8. Virtual servers can be provisioned more quickly than their physical counterparts; require less space, power, and cooling than multiple physical servers; and provide better crash protection and faster crash recovery than physical systems.

A hypervisor imposes the following set of attributes on virtual servers that traditional x86 servers lack:

●   Isolation: A virtual server is confined to one container and is unaware of other virtual servers.

●   Multiplicity: A virtual server shares hardware concurrently with other virtual servers.

●   Abstraction: A virtual server is hardware-independent and can run on various platforms.

●   Encapsulation: A virtual server stores its complete point-in-time execution state in a file.

These fundamental attributes are the building blocks of the higher-level virtualization capabilities (Figure 9).

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) is a high-performance, enterprise- and production-class hypervisor. It has been optimized for the Cisco SRE blade to provide features such as serial console access. The initial version of Cisco SRE-V is equivalent to Version 4.1 of the VMware vSphere Hypervisor.

Microsoft Windows Server Platform

Cisco UCS Express has undergone the Microsoft certification process for Microsoft Windows Server. The Cisco SRE blade hardware has passed Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL) testing and has been certified for compatibility with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008. The Cisco SRE-V platform has passed Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) testing and has been certified for supportability with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Table 2 summarizes the certified Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Table 2.       Microsoft Windows Operating Systems Certified for Cisco UCS Express

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) supports a large number of operating systems, which should function as expected. Most distributions of enterprise-class Linux operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Oracle Linux, have been verified to work on top of the Cisco SRE-V platform.

Integrated Blade Management

Cisco UCS Express provides lights-out management for SRE blades through Cisco IMC Express. Cisco IMC Express performs the function of a baseboard management controller for all Cisco SRE blades present in the Cisco ISR G2 chassis, as shown in Figure 10. With Cisco IMC Express, you can provision the hypervisor on the Cisco SRE blades, configure interfaces, monitor hardware status, and manage power for the blades. Cisco UCS Express is embedded in the Cisco ISR G2 motherboard, runs on dedicated hardware resources, and operates independently of the Cisco IOS Software process.

Cisco IMC Express offers command-line interface (CLI) and GUI management consoles, as shown in Figure 11. Both have the same user interface as Cisco IMC for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers, providing management consistency between Cisco data center and branch-office servers.

Domain-Based Management

Cisco UCS Express offers domain-based separation of management functions. The system is designed to provide convergence of networking, computing, and virtualization platforms; however, management was explicitly designed to maintain the traditional access-control boundaries between networking and computing teams. Access to network management tools is controlled and enforced by the Cisco IOS Software. The user accounts created to manage the router cannot access the virtualization or computing management tools. Access to virtualization management tools is controlled and enforced by Cisco SRE-V Software or VMware vCenter Server. The user accounts created to manage the hypervisor cannot access the networking or compute management tools. Access to the computing management tools is controlled by Cisco IMC Express. The user accounts created to manage the Cisco SRE blades cannot access the networking or virtualization management tools. Cisco UCS Express uses familiar management tools to manage the platform (Table 3).

Table 3.       Management Tools for Cisco UCS Express

Cisco UCS Express Advantage

Cisco UCS Express provides lower TCO than alternative solutions. It offers the following cost savings in comparison to tower servers with virtualization:

●   Hardware support included in Cisco SMARTnet^® Services support for router

●   Virtualization support included in Cisco SMARTnet Services support for router

●   Reduced device and cooling power consumption

●   Fewer onsite visits and lower shipping costs

●   No wires or ports plus reduced physical space

Figure 12 compares the 3-year TCO of an equally priced Cisco UCS Express system and a tower server with VMware vSphere Hypervisor. In this example, the TCO of Cisco UCS Express is approximately 50 percent lower than that of the tower server.

Figure 13 compares the cost savings achieved by converting three physical servers to virtual servers and consolidating them on a single Cisco UCS Express SRE blade server. In this example, the TCO for Cisco UCS Express is approximately 75 percent lower than that for the three physical servers.

Features and Benefits

Table 4 lists the features and benefits of Cisco UCS Express.

Table 4.       Cisco UCS Express Features and Benefits

Supported Platforms

Table 5 lists the supported Cisco SRE platforms, and Table 6 lists the Cisco EtherSwitch modules that support the Cisco ISR G2 MGF. Cisco IMC Express runs on the Cisco ISR G2 motherboard and requires additional memory and two compact flash cards, as shown in Table 7.

Table 5.       Supported Cisco SRE Platforms

Table 6.       Cisco ISR G2 MGF Supported Cisco EtherSwitch Modules

Table 7.       Cisco IMC Express Memory and Compact Flash Requirements for ISRs

Older enhanced network modules (NMEs) and HWIC Cisco EtherSwitch modules will work with Cisco UCS Express but cannot take advantage of the MGF backplane switch.

Licensing

Cisco UCS Express provides license-based activation for the Cisco SRE-V software. Table 8 lists the permanent Cisco UCS Express licenses. By default, the Cisco SRE-V Software comes with a one-time evaluation license. When you order Cisco SRE and SRE-V without a permanent license, or when you download Cisco SRE-V software from Cisco.com and install it on the Cisco SRE, the evaluation license will enable full Cisco SRE-V functions for 60 days. The built-in evaluation license gives you an opportunity to try the product before making a purchase decision. To activate the permanent license past the evaluation period, you must purchase a spare product authorization key and redeem it for a permanent Cisco SRE-V license key online at the VMware website.

Table 8.       Cisco UCS Express Licenses

Product Specifications

Cisco UCS Express integrates and consolidates several existing hardware products. Detailed specifications are available at the locations listed in Table 9.

Table 9.       Product Specifications

System Requirements

For the Cisco MGF backplane switch and Cisco IMC Express to function, Cisco UCS Express requires Cisco IOS Software Release 15.1(4)M for Cisco 2911, 2921, 2951, 3925, 3925E, 3945, and 3945E ISRs.

Warranty Information

Cisco SRE blades are covered by a 90-day warranty. Find warranty information on Cisco.com at the Product Warranties page.

Ordering Information

To place an order, visit the Cisco Ordering homepage and refer to Table 10. To download software, visit the Cisco Software Center. The Cisco SRE-V software is available only from Cisco, not VMware.

Table 10.     Ordering Information

Several bundle offers are available for Cisco UCS Express to simplify ordering and provide additional savings on multiproduct solutions, as shown in Table 11. All Cisco UCS Express bundles come with the Cisco SRE 900 or SRE 910, Cisco SRE-V hypervisor software, maximum Cisco ISR DRAM, Cisco IMC Express software, and additional Compact Flash memory for the Cisco IMC Express. You can optionally purchase VMware vCenter Server management agent with any of the Cisco UCS Express bundles.

Table 11.     Cisco UCS Express Bundles

Services and Support Information

Cisco SRE hardware and Cisco SRE-V software service and support are covered by the Cisco SMARTnet contract for the router in which the module will reside, as shown in Figure 14. The support for Cisco SRE-V is provided by the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), not VMware. Cisco SMARTnet technical support is available on a one-time or annual contract basis. Support options range from help-desk assistance to proactive, onsite consultation.

All support contracts include:

●   Major Cisco IOS Software updates for protocol, security, bandwidth, and feature improvements

●   Full access rights to Cisco.com technical libraries for technical assistance, electronic commerce, and product information

●   Access to the industry's largest dedicated technical support staff 24 hours a day

For more information about Cisco services, refer to Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.

The Cisco UCS Express bundles have specific Cisco SMARTnet technical services contracts, as shown in Table 12. The Cisco UCS Express and Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) bundles include the Cisco WAAS Software Application Support and Upgrade (SASU) contract.

Table 12.     Cisco SMARTnet Support for Cisco UCS Express Bundles

Cisco and Partner Services for the Branch Office

Services from Cisco and our certified partners can help you transform the branch-office experience and accelerate business innovation and growth in Cisco Borderless Networks. We have the depth and breadth of expertise to create a clear, replicable, optimized branch-office footprint across technologies. Planning and design services align technology with business goals and can increase the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of deployment. Technical services help improve operational efficiency, save money, and mitigate risk. Optimization services are designed to continuously improve performance and help your team succeed with new technologies. For more information, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/services.

For More Information

For more information about Cisco UCS Express, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucse/ or contact your local Cisco account representative.

For more information about Cisco products, contact:

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