By John Gardner | 5 Min Videos | Technical Level: Beginner

In these two videos, SLI instructor, John, will give you a quick overview of two new Cisco data center classes: DCIUCS and DCCUCS. These two classes are taught in the same week. DCIUCS is a two-day class running Monday-Tuesday and DCCUCS is a three-day class running Wednesday-Friday. He will explain who the courses are best for, associated certifications, prerequisites, and main topics you will learn. Watch other videos like these on our YouTube channel. 

DCIUCS Overview

The Introducing Cisco Unified Computing System (DCIUCS) v1.0 is an introductory course that shows you how to deploy, secure, operate, and maintain the Cisco Unified Computing system (Cisco UCS©) B-Series blade servers, Cisco UCS C-Series and S-Series rack servers, and Cisco HyperFlex product family for use in data centers.

Thank you for joining us for the introduction for the Introducing Cisco Unified Compute Systems (DCIUCS) course. What is our target audience for the course? If you are provisioning Hardware, racking and stacking cabling server hardware, or from a server administrator perspective, you may want to sit this course. Also, anybody who’s going to be managing network connectivity and VLAN configuration from the servers to the network is a prime candidate. Likewise, with the system engineers, we’re looking at people who are installing operating systems such as VMware ESXi, hyper-v, or KVM from Linux, any operating system including the hypervisor operating systems. Any Network administrator’s looking for troubleshooting and maintenance for network connectivity issues and also any storage administrators looking to get a little bit more information on how the UCS system provisions storage and apply storage.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this course are a generalized knowledge of servers is pretty adequate. We’d like you to have some routing and switching background. Storage area network and server virtualization are not as heavy in this course, but it’s a very nice thing to have under your belt. The recommended training before we start taking this course is the Cisco Certified Network Administrator (CCNA) and the Understanding Cisco Data Center Foundations (DCFNDU) course. Both of these courses will give you a generalized understanding of routing and switching, server configuration, and data center networking.

Key Drivers

If you’re looking to learn about B and C series server hardware, this course is for you. Also, if you’re looking to figure out what a service profile is and why it’s so important, this course is for you. We’re going to show you how to navigate the UCS manager, which is really the brains of the operation here for the unified compute system. We’re also going to gain some knowledge through hands-on practical labs utilizing data center equipment and software. If you’re looking to prepare for either a current or new job role in the data center utilizing UCS, this course is for you.

Key Technologies

As I mentioned before, we’re going to be talking about the Cisco UCS B and C series server hardware, what’s the CPU and memory requirements and capabilities, and what’s the hardware and hard drive capabilities of the B and C series servers. We’ll also be talking about the difference in managing the B and C Series servers. With that being said, we’re going to get into the fabric interconnect and utilizing the UCS manager for the administration of the B and C series servers. The things that we talk about the most is service profiles and service profile templates. Service profiles for Hardware identity that we can move from one server to another and then the service profile templates that allow us to template one profile and use it many times. We’re also going to getting in storage allocation for servers, not only just for Boot From SAN configurations if that’s what you’re looking for, but we also discuss local raid configurations. One of the last things we discuss is the VLAN/VSAN or the networking and storage networking configurations.

Related Training

We do provide the next course in this series the DCCUCS. This course should be taken after the DCIUCS course because it is going to focus more on configuration and troubleshooting, not just an introduction. Some of the other related courses – you may want to take a look at Hyperflex or the application-centric infrastructure courses because again, the UCS system is the platform that ACI and Hyperflex really live on. Likewise, with the UCS director and the UCS director with ACI, you may want to take a look at administering more than just one data center. With the DCCUCS again, we want to make sure that this is the second course in your unified compute system courses.

Related Certifications

The last thing here is the related certifications with our DCCOR and DCACI. These two courses are really for people who are looking for data center introductions not just from a data center perspective, but also from an application-centric infrastructure perspective. If you’re looking for storage, we do have the DCMDS course, and if you’re looking for automating your data center with some UCS components, we can take a look at the DCAUI course.

DCCUCS Overview

The Configuring Cisco Unified Computing System (DCCUCS) v1.0 shows you how to deploy, secure, operate, and maintain Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS©) B-series blade servers, Cisco UCS C-Series, and S-Series rack servers for use in data centers.

Thank you very much for joining us for the Configuring Cisco Unified Compute Systems (DCCUCS) course outline. What is our target audience here for the course? If you are provisioning Hardware, racking and stacking cabling server hardware, or from a server administrator perspective, you may want to sit this course. Also, anybody who’s going to be managing network connectivity and VLAN configuration from the servers to the network is a prime candidate. Likewise, with the system engineers, we’re looking at people who are installing operating systems such as VMware ESXi, hyper-v, or KVM from Linux, any operating system including the hypervisor operating systems. Any Network administrator’s looking for troubleshooting and maintenance for network connectivity issues and also any storage administrators looking to get a little bit more information on how the UCS system provisions storage and apply storage.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this course are general knowledge of servers, routing and switching, storage area networking and server virtualization, and also we want you to be familiar with routing and switching with the CCNA or the DCFNDU course. Again, you need to take that DCIUCS course to get a fairly good understanding of the unified compute system itself.

Key Drivers

The key benefits that we’re going to get from this course are instead of just implementation and maintenance, this course actually delves very deep into configuration and troubleshooting. We’re going to dive deep into the B and C series server configurations. We’re going to talk about service profiles way more in-depth and also service profile templates to make your life a lot easier. Then, we’re going to jump way more in-depth on the UCS manager and not only just configuration but from a troubleshooting perspective. Just like the last course, you are going to get hands-on practice with industry-standard data, center equipment, and software. Hopefully, we can use that information to prepare you for a new or existing job.

Key Technologies

Now, some key technologies that we’re going to discuss. As I mentioned before, we’re going to be talking about the Cisco UCS B and C series server hardware, what’s the CPU and memory requirements and capabilities, and what’s the hardware and hard drive capabilities of the B and C series servers? We’ll also be talking about the difference in managing the B and C series servers. With that being said, we’re going to get into the fabric interconnects and utilizing the UCS manager for the administration of the B and C series servers. The things that we talk about the most is service profiles and service profile templates. Service profiles for hardware identity that we can move from one server to another and then the service profile templates that allow us to template one profile and use it many times. We’re also going to get into storage allocation for servers. Not only just for Boot From SAN configurations, if that’s what you’re looking for, but we also discuss local raid configurations. One of the last things we discuss here is the VLAN/VSAN or the networking and storage networking configurations.

Related Training Products

For our related training products, we do offer the DCIUCS course, which is the prerequisite for this course, but we also offer two other very important courses. The Hyperflex and ACI courses – those two are more for if you would like to learn about what else we can run on UCS. The other one here is the UCS director. The UCS director foundations course is going to give you a base foundation of what UCS director is and how we can use it to manage multiple data centers. The designing and deploying course is giving you the capability of building out things like workflows to make automation and design much easier across multiple data centers.

Related Certifications

The last thing here is the related certifications with our DCCOR and DCACI. These two courses are really for people who are looking for data center introductions not just from a data center perspective, but also from an application-centric infrastructure perspective. If you’re looking for storage, we do have the DCMDS course and if you’re looking for automating your data center with some UCS components, we can take a look at the DCAUI course.

Instructor Bio:

As a specialist in the data center space, John provides consulting, implementation, and support of Cisco data center infrastructures. In addition to his CCSI, he holds CCNP certifications in the Cisco Data Center, Cloud and Service Provider spaces, CCNA Cyber Ops, and can deliver the FP200 course for Cisco HTD. John has developed full data center labs for Cisco Nexus and ACI products, created data center derivative works courseware, and has recorded several Data Center videos for Cisco eLearning products. His broad experience will help us continue to grow and deliver outstanding product options to our customers.