Its not every day you get to see VMware running on a new bit of hardware, especially a new hardware manufacturer. There will be lots of VMware on Cisco UCS happing at VMworld in a few weeks but for those who can't wait to see some exciting new stuff, here is what it looks like.

The weirdest part is the splash screen as the blade boots!



Here is the BIOS page where various options can be turned on/off for the Nehalem 5540 processors.



One thing I have found so far is that the service profiles (the personality associated with a blade) does not include all of the BIOS settings, this is expected for the future. The service profile does currently include things like the versions of various firmware, boot order and local RAID settings. Therefore putting a new service profile on a blade will reconfigure the local RAID controller etc, but it won't update the processor settings in the BIOS. It has not caused me a problem yet but its something to be aware of because it could cause you some pain if an incorrect BIOS setting went unnoticed.

Here is what the summary page for the hardware looks like inside of vSphere.



Notice the hardware manufacturer is Cisco Systems Inc. Don't get confused by the model number being "N20-B6620-1", thats the actual Cisco part number for a "UCS B200 M1 Blade Server". If you look in the UCS Manager (UCSM) its the PID or Product ID for the device.

Here is what the Ethernet adapters look like.



By the time I get to VMworld I hope to have some further insights as to what its like to run VMware on UCS from a VMware administrator perspective. Maybe even some performance tests.