Openstack reference architecture using Cisco UCS hardware platform

There are many vendors to chose from when selecting your hardware for a complete Openstack deployment (example list of data center friendly networking vendors to look at ). And to make it even more difficult you need to think about all spectrum of vendors like networking, storage and compute.

In one of my previous posts (How to estimate hardware requirements for your private Openstack deployment) I tried to demonstrate an example hardware recommendation for an Openstack deployment. Today we are going to look at this topic once again but exploring the Cisco UCS product line instead.

The data below are taken from the Cisco PDF white paper Red Hat Openstack Architecture on Cisco UCS platform from the DesignZone for Cloud Automation Solution section on Cisco site (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise/data-center-designs-cloud-computing/could_automation.html).

Openstack on Cisco UCS hardware platform

Cisco is no longer only a networking vendor. With the UCS they offer as well computer platform where you can put together a server with specific hard drive size,  mount of RAM or type of CPU, interconnection card etc. An example configuration taken from the Cisco document above:

That means if we put togheter the UCS servers and the Cisco Nexus switches and Openstack software we can build a simple POC like this one:

In the white paper we can actually find a full list of hardware if you would like to build it yourself.