Accepted Solutions
Please see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2270865?tstart=0 where you get answers to all of your questions
1. what is the difference between a "Service Profile" and Virtual machine? Are they both different names of same concept?
NO, not at all, a SP is a new concept, introduced with UCS architecture; it allows you to abstract the hardware of a server. It defines a template and/or a logical server: eg. number of vhba's, number of vnics, mac address pwwn/nwwn, BIOS version, boot policy/boot order. The values of mac, pwwn, nwwn, UUID are taken out of predefined pools, therefore they are hardware independent. Then you associate a SP with a physical blade, which then imposes all the above configuration on the real physical server. The relationship between SP and physical server is 1 to 1; if you need 10 ESXi servers, you need 10 SP's.
UCS is OS agnostic, it has no clue what the installed OS is. Therefore in UCS there are no OS specific agents.
VM appear in the context of server virtualization, and are completely different from SP.
see also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YGJlP2q5Go
2. What is the concept behind virtual switch? Is it used to connect VMs or Service Profiles? If it is so, is it installed on a server over a VM/SP or something else?
Each hypervisor (Hyper-v, ESXi, Xen,...) is using a virtual switch (software); it is required to locally switch traffic between 2 VM's on the same physical host. VM's connect to the virtual switch.
3. I would appreciate if somebody could share a logical diagram showing overall concept of integrated service profile, virtual switch, VNIC, vEth, blade servers, etc.
