VMworld 2009, held in San Francisco Aug. 31 through Sept. 3, was noteworthy only for its major product announcements and large attendance-nearly 13,000-but it also sported the biggest deployment thus far of Cisco Systems’ new Unified Computing System.

Cisco’s UCS, launched last March 16, consists of a new data center architecture, a new server and a new set of management software and services based on Intel’s powerful quad-core Nehalem Xeon processors. Cisco partners that include EMC and NetApp [storage], BMC [management software], VMware Microsoft [virtualization software layers], and Accenture [product configurations] are pitching in on the deployments, which Cisco says are gaining traction.

Cisco’s VMworld Data Center was used to run 23 different labs, including 11 self-paced labs. More than over 4,000 users were trained in these labs over the four days of the conference. The architecture was designed, architected and implemented in a record two months and was comprised of 16 Unified Computing Systems, supporting 1,024 processors. It was provisioned and up and running less than 30 days from the first customer shipment to support the big event. The architecture featured Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 hardware, including the Nexus and MDS switches.

Here is a quick-click tour through the huge but temporary data center, which is larger and more powerful than most of the world’s permanent data centers.
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