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VCE Vblock™ Systems Series 700 Architecture Overview
Chassis activation kits (CAK)
The power supplies and fabric extenders for all chassis are pre-populated and cabled, and all required Twinax
cables and transceivers are populated. However, in a base Vblock system configuration, only two of the Cisco
UCS 5100 series blade server chassis are licensed for fabric interconnect ports. This limited licensing reduces
the entry cost for Vblock systems.
As more blades are added and additional chassis are required, chassis activation kits are added automatically
by the VCE configuration tool. The kit contains software licenses to enable additional fabric interconnect ports.
The VCE configuration tool enables only enough port licenses for the minimum number of chassis to contain
the blades ordered. At the customer's discretion, chassis activation kits can be added up-front to allow for
flexibility in the field or to initially spread the blades across a larger number of chassis.
Bare-metal support
If applications cannot be virtualized due to technical or commercial reasons, Vblock system blades can be
deployed bare-metal; that is, with non-virtualized operating system and application configurations. Bare-metal
workloads always require separate physical spindles, disk groups, and pools to ensure that bare-metal
workloads do not adversely impact Vblock system workloads.
VCE can provide reasonable-effort support for bare-metal blades only if the bare-metal deployment complies
with the following requirements:
•
The base Vblock system contains only VCE published, tested, and validated hardware and software
components. The VCE Vblock Systems Release Certification Matrix provides a list of the certified
versions of components for Vblock Series 700. Refer to
Accessing VCE documentation.
•
The applications and operating systems for tested Vblock systems software for both compute and
storage components are included in published support matrices from EMC and Cisco.
For bare-metal deployments that include other hypervisor technologies (Hyper-V, KVM, etc.), those hypervisor
technologies are not supported by VCE.
VCE reasonable effort support means that VCE determines that the base Vblock system is operating correctly,
and assists in problem resolution to a reasonable extent. VCE is unable to reproduce problems or provide
support on the operating systems installed for bare-metal deployments. VCE cannot provide updates to those
operating systems or test them. Customers must work directly with their support vendors for issues and
patches for those operating systems.
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