Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 7
Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
GREATER BANDWIDTH HEADROOM PROVIDES EXCELLENT SCALABILITY
Although the Cisco UCS offers scalable bandwidth to each Cisco UCS 5108 Chassis, up to
a fully redundant 80 Gb/s (160 Gb/s in an active-active configuration), in our testing we used a
single redundant pair of 2 x 10Gb/s connections to the fabric interconnect. The peak bandwidth
was about 600 megabits per second, or roughly 3 percent of the bandwidth available. See
Appendix D for details. Note that the peak usage includes all storage and virtual desktop traffic.
This shows that the chassis capacity far exceeds the required bandwidth for virtual desktop
users based on our test results. The bandwidth afforded by the Cisco UCS architecture provides
sufficient headroom for excellent scalability as your IT staff adds more Cisco UCS B200 M3
server blades to support larger user populations.
For information about Login VSI and the pieces of the solution we tested, see the What
we tested section below. For server and storage configuration information, see Appendix A. To
see the step-by-step process we used for testing, see Appendix B.
WHAT WE TESTED
About the Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server
The Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server is an enterprise-class blade server powered by the
new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 series to deliver high performance and outstanding I/O
throughput for your applications. Supporting up to 384 GB of RAM with 24 DIMM slots, the
Cisco UCS M200 M3 has expandable memory capabilities to support your heavy workloads. The
B200 M3 blade will support a configuration of up to 768 GB when 32GB DIMMs are available
later this year.
To learn more, see Appendix A for more detailed hardware specifications, or visit
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12288/index.html.
About the Cisco UCS Manager
The Cisco UCS Manager enables unified, embedded management that integrates the
management of both software and hardware on the Cisco UCS solution. The UCS Manager
centralizes server management, making it easier in several key ways. First, role-based
management makes it easy to assign unique management roles to different administrators (i.e.,
server, network, or storage admins) so that each can be assigned his or her own unique policies
and permissions, while still being part of an integrated management environment. Policy-based
provisioning provides managers with the ability to create service profile templates that they
apply to one or 100 servers, making it easy to apply consistent policies. The Cisco USC Manager
makes server management less about managing isolated, single hardware components and
more about managing many hardware components (up to 40 chassis and 320 blades) as a single
management domain. The use of service profiles allows managers to allocate and reallocate
server resources, which the UCS Manager views as “raw computing capacity.” This way, server