The Cisco UCS Platform moves the concept of virtualization to the actual hardware.  So where VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft provide products that abstract the physical hardware to allow greater utilization of server hardware, Cisco has extended the concept abstracting hardware to the actual physical servers or blades.  Physical hardware has UUID, MAC Addresses and WWNN/WWPN addresses burned into the hardware, this means the operating system will key in on these addresses for certain features.  While hypervisor’s hide this physical addressing from the Virtual Machines (VM), the hypervisor itself is tied to these addresses.  This means that you cannot simply upgrade a blade or server by simply replacing it with a newer version, even in a boot from SAN environment without some manual intervention.  Cisco UCS allows for these addresses to be virtual and applied to blade, meaning the addresses can actually be moved from one blade to another.  This accomplished through the use of Service Profiles that contain the configuration of the not only the addressing (UUID, MAC, and WWNN/WWPN) but also the firmware version, number of NICs, number of FC HBAs, bios settings (CPU settings, Memory settings, etc), and boot order.  The Cisco UCS and Data Center products (Nexus 2000/5000/7000, WAAS, ACE, etc) are moving towards a wire once model for all connectivity options (Ethernet, FC, FCoE, or iSCSI).  The means that once the Data Center is wired adding or changing connectivity options does not require the planning, expense and downtime to re-wire.

The combination of Cisco UCS and hypervisor brings virtualization to both hardware and software forming the a very formidable backbone for the next generation data center.  As many companies move towards greater levels of virtualization, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and public cloud to provide more services to end users having scalable and flexible hardware platform is just a key as having a hypervisor that it is scalable and flexible.

The Xiotech Emprise 5000 with 7.8TB of useable RAID5 storage and linear expansion using the above IOP figures provide the following level of VDI Users:

Each ISE is only 3U and is able to provide a very high density of VDI users with excellent performance and reliability.  Given most hypervisor vendors recommend 32-64 VDI VMs per physical host this configuration allows for 40U of rackspace to provide 1392 end users virtual desktops (using twenty-four 1U servers, four 1U FC Switches, and four ISEs).  The gains would be all the redundancy of the hypervisors high availability features, resource management, datacenter power redundancy (UPS and/or Generator) and the ability to enhance security by having all corporate data actually in the datacenter, opposed to user desktops and laptops.