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The rack mount server uses the direct-attached design to connect directly into the FIs and does not use an optional FEX.

The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

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These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of a customer.

CVDs deliver a validated design, documentation and support information to guide customers from design to deployment.

SmartStack minimizes IT risk by testing the integrated architecture to ensure compatibility between integrated components.

SmartStack also addresses IT pain points by providing documented design guidance, deployment guidance, and support that can be used in all stages (planning, design, and implementation) of a deployment.

SmartStack Design Guide associated with this deployment guide can be found at.

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SmartStack integrates Cisco UCS compute, Nimble CS700 storage, Cisco Nexus 9000 series platform switch and Cisco MDS Fabric switch to deliver a foundational platform capable of supporting multiple services and applications.

SmartStack delivers compute, storage, Fibre Channel (FC) based 8G SAN connectivity and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) LAN connectivity in a highly resilient, flexible and scalable architecture.

The SAN fabric from Cisco MDS to Nimble array can scale to 16G Fibre Channel with existing infrastructure.

The architecture can also support 16G FC end-to-end by migrating from Cisco 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects in the current design to Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects.

The LAN network architecture using Cisco Nexus 9300 series has the port density for significant scale and provides a migration path to 40GbE LAN connectivity and Cisco ACI with investment protection.

Each functional layer (compute, network, and storage) of the architecture is designed to be highly resilient.

Two SAN fabrics provide redundant paths for SAN boot and block storage to shared datastores.

This document assumes that a Common POD already exists in the deployment and therefore the focus here is on the deployment of the SmartStack POD.

Note, that the Management POD can use the same design as SmartStack POD.

Several models of these servers are supported Cisco UCS B200M4 and C220 M4 servers were used for validation.

The compute design consists of an infrastructure management POD and an application POD, each with its own hardware and running VMware ESXi 6.0 U1b hypervisor.

For validation, common components such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, vCenter, Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual supervisor module (VSM) and Cisco UCS Performance Manager were deployed in an infrastructure management POD.

For validation, IOMeter virtual machines representing application VMs were hosted on the SmartStack POD.

Depending on the size and needs of a deployment, the common services can also be deployed with Applications VMs on a SmartStack POD.

The blade server chassis and rack mount servers connect into a pair of Cisco UCS 6248 Fabric Interconnects (FI).

The blade server chassis connects to the FI through the Cisco FEX module located at the back of the chassis.

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