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Sandeep Singh
Level 7
Level 7

 

Introduction

UCS B-Series blade servers come in two form factors: full width and half width. Both of these types of blades are based on x86 architecture and come with dual Intel Xeon 5500 series quad-core processors. These blades support DDR3 memory, up to two mezzanine cards and two optional hot-swappable SAS hard drives in no RAID, RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. The supported DDR3 memory speeds are DDR3-800, DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333(only on Xeon X5570 processor). The chipset on the blades is provided by Intel and is based on Tylersburg IOH (or the Northbridge) and ICH10 Southbridge. The Xeon 5500 series processors comes with integrated memory controller and thus removing one of the processors from the blade reduces the total memory supported into half. These blades also have an integrated internal BMC which provides control and monitoring of the blade as well as local and remote access to Keyboard, Video, Mouse and Media. The BMC also monitors the blade’s thermal information from the processor, memory and the motherboard. The BIOS in the blades is based on AMI Aptio EFI BIOS and provides features like processor settings, memory settings, power management, managing boot devices, etc. The BMC communicates with BIOS using IPMI.

 

B200 M1 half-width Blade Server Overview

The half width blade or the UCS B200 M1 Blade takes half slot in the UCS chassis and supports up to 96 GB of DDR3 memory using 8 GB memory modules. It has 12 DDR3 DIMM slots which mean 6 DIMM slots per processor socket since the memory controller is integrated with the processor. The half width blade supports only one mezzanine card for all the I/O from the server blade. Depending on the type of the mezzanine card the system will show two 10 Gb NICs (for UCS 82598KR-CI card) or two 10 Gb NICs and two HBAs (for UCS M71KR-E/ UCS M71KR-Q card). Regardless of the type of the mezzanine card there are two 10 Gb interfaces for connectivity to the outside and thus the total speed will be 20 Gb excluding any oversubscription.

 

B250 M1 full-width Blade Server Overview

The full width blade or the UCS B250 M1 Extended Memory Blade takes a full slot in the UCS chassis and supports up to 384 GB of DDR3 memory using 8 GB memory modules. It has 48 DDR3 DIMM slots which mean 24 DIMM slots per processor socket since the memory controller is integrated with the processor. The support for extra memory is made possible by application of Cisco Extended memory technology which provides connectivity for up to 64 GB per DDR3 channel. Instead of directly connecting one DDR3 channel to the memory controller, four DDR3 sub-channels are connected to the memory controller indirectly. This extension is performed at the hardware level, and it is completely transparent to the operating system and its applications. The full width blade supports up to two mezzanine cards for carrying all the I/O from the server blade. Hence the total speed for I/O will be 40 Gb excluding any oversubscription and the system will show four 10 Gb NICs (for UCS 82598KR-CI card) or four 10 Gb NICs and four HBAs (for UCS M71KR-E/ UCS M71KR-Q card).

 

Related Information

What are the hardware components of UCS
What are the differences between UCS Blade Servers and Rack Servers
What are the supported expansion modules and license requirement in UCS

 

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