{"id":389,"date":"2011-06-27T17:58:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T23:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=389"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:25:16","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:25:16","slug":"one-of-my-favorite-features-of-cisco-ucs-bios-in-service-profiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=389","title":{"rendered":"One of my favorite features of Cisco UCS: BIOS in service profiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the \u00a0Gartner data center conference in December 2010 they reported that \u00a038% of IT costs are personnel<\/a>. \u00a0Given that almost 40% of your cost in IT is personnel, it would make sense to invest in tools and equipment that make it so they can be as efficient as possible. \u00a0I’d like to illustrate how UCS decreases costs by making employees more efficient. \u00a0Instead of high level over views like you may be\u00a0accustomed\u00a0to reading, \u00a0let me give a hands on analysis and illustrate just one feature in UCS that can save several thousand dollars.<\/p>\n

Consider this example:<\/p>\n

You just ordered 300 non-UCS blades and they just arrived to your datacenter.\u00a0 You will now need to set the BIOS in these servers to enable Intel VT because you want virtualization right? \u00a0How do you do this? \u00a0Your entry level systems engineer that needs to do this is getting paid $64,000 a year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A. \u00a0The Dumb way) \u00a0You will now need to boot each blade up, press F1 (and hope you don\u2019t miss that screen!), go to through the menus, select the right place, save, and reboot.\u00a0 That probably took 5 minutes if you\u2019re good.\u00a0 (Boot times on blades and rack servers are about 2 minutes given all the fancy hardware checks). \u00a0That was easy, took little thought and it cost you\u00a0$775 to get it done. \u00a0($64k \/52 weeks \/ 40 hours\/week \u00a0=~ $31\/hour). \u00a0Except, now you boot up and find that he missed a few. \u00a0Oh, and then you find out that “Surprise!” you didn’t enable VT for Directed IO. \u00a0Bummer. \u00a0So now that cost you another $775 to change it. \u00a0So solution A \u00a0only cost $1550. …Except, you forgot to factor in opportunity cost. \u00a0Our entry level engineer could have been doing something else productive. \u00a0So your real cost is about $3100 AND, you still don’t know if everything is right do you? \u00a0If you want to know what the BIOS is set to, you can just try it blindly, or you can reboot, press F1 and take a look. \u00a0This is a great strategy for 1 server. \u00a0If you have more, then this is just plain dumb. \u00a0Also, because of the difficulty of changing this, you may miss out on the benefits of other BIOS settings like Turby Boost. \u00a0So the best you can do with this is pay $1550. \u00a0Thats just a drop in the bucket for 300 servers isn’t it? \u00a0But does it sound painful? \u00a0Yes. \u00a0And I can tell you from experience, it does nothing to improve moral.<\/p>\n

B. \u00a0The smarter way) \u00a0Many vendors include command line tools with their systems. \u00a0So you can get a smarter person who knows how to do this stuff via the network. \u00a0This way, you don’t have to wait for the systems to boot up. \u00a0In some cases you can configure it through the BMCs. \u00a0There are a few drawbacks with this solution:<\/p>\n

– \u00a0You have to run some sort of script again to see what state your BIOS settings are in. \u00a0I have often done this in the past with an awesome perl script, usually within the xCAT framework.<\/p>\n

– \u00a0It turns out vendors still don’t implement this right. \u00a0Often it will require several reboots for this to be correct.<\/p>\n

– \u00a0It still takes a lot of time to set up and that setup is usually outside the framework of the application that manages the blades. \u00a0So now you have to document this and make sure you have it right. \u00a0Oh, and skills transfer to others in the organization? \u00a0Probably not.<\/p>\n

– You need to go on the vendors web site and hunt down this information: \u00a0Where is this magical tool? \u00a0At IBM its called ASU<\/a>. \u00a0At Dell its Open Manage<\/a>. \u00a0(or kcsflash if you’re lucky enough to be working on Linux). \u00a0The other tools you can find will be left as an\u00a0exercise\u00a0to the reader.<\/p>\n

– This is not the same interface that you manage the blades with. \u00a0For example, on IBM blades you can configure the boot order in the AMM, but you can’t enable Hyperthreading on the processors. \u00a0So you’ll just have to deal with it. \u00a0Sorry.<\/p>\n

My typical implementation of this is that I automate this with xCAT. \u00a0It generally works pretty well and as new hardware items are added, they automatically get updated with the correct BIOS settings. \u00a0The problem with this is that it hardly ever looks like an Enterprise solution. \u00a0In fact it is only a band-aid to a glaring hole in most of the Server management solutions that I’ve seen. \u00a0I still like it and if you’re ok doing it, go for it. \u00a0While I think this method improves moral, I think its still just as expensive as solution A.<\/p>\n

C. \u00a0The UCS way (much easier). \u00a0You open up UCS manager, head over to the Server tab on the left hand side. \u00a0From there go down the Servers -> Policies -> root (or create a subgroup) -> BIOS policies. \u00a0From here, you point and click and get the settings the way you want them. \u00a0You add this to your service profile template, and then create service profiles from it for all 300 blades. \u00a0(to be honest, if this is UCS, you have to do this 2 times since each UCSM can only manage at most 160 blades.) \u00a0This takes a few minutes to do. \u00a0No waiting. \u00a0From there, you just power on the server and the BIOS settings are updated by default.<\/p>\n

Here are the advantages of this:<\/p>\n

– No third party tools, very easy, no pain!<\/p>\n

– Single Pane of Glass (meaning you do it from the same management tool that you manage the rest of the servers).<\/p>\n

– Enterprise level. \u00a0I sometimes think that Enterprise Level = “A dumb person could do it with little training”. \u00a0But yeah, that same guy who can press F1 on 300 servers certainly has enough skill to configure this.<\/p>\n

– If you decide you need to update the BIOS settings, you do it once and its done everywhere.<\/p>\n

These BIOS settings take about 5 minutes to set up. \u00a0You can experiment to see if you get better performance with Hyperthreading, or Turbo boost. \u00a0In essence: your system engineers can now do things that are more productive!<\/p>\n

Ok, so what, you saved $1500. \u00a0I think you could argue that it was maybe $2,000. \u00a0Yes, there are more features in UCS that can add more. \u00a0In fact, they just keep adding up. \u00a0And that’s just the point: \u00a0Often in managing data centers its the little things that keep adding up that keep adding to cost, complexity, and problems. \u00a0By taking care of lots of little things, all the sudden the costs start to go down big time!<\/p>\n

I expect other vendors to add this functionality over time. \u00a0Its these little things that make a system engineer happy. \u00a0And its just one reason I really like UCS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the \u00a0Gartner data center conference in December 2010 they reported that \u00a038% of IT costs are personnel. \u00a0Given that almost 40% of your cost in IT is personnel, it would make sense to invest in tools and equipment that make it so they can be as efficient as possible. \u00a0I’d like to illustrate how…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[990],"tags":[993],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2790,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/2790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}