What is UCS,VSM and VEM

A unified computing system (UCS) is is a converged data center architecture that integrates computing, networking and storage resources to  increase efficiency and enable centralized management.


UCS products are designed and configured to work together effectively.The goal of a UCS product line is to simplify the number of devices that need to be connected, configured, cooled and secured and provide administrators with the ability to manage everything through a single graphical interface.
The term unified computing system is often associated with Cisco.

 Cisco UCS products have the ability to support traditional operating sytem (OS) and application stacks in physical environments, but are optimized for virtualized environments.

Everything is managed through Cisco UCS Manager, a software application that allows administrators to provision the server, storage and network resources all at once from a single pane of glass.

Similar offerings to Cisco UCS include HP BladeSystem Matrix, Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ, Sun Modular Datacenter and InteliCloud 360.

Cisco Nexus 1000V manages a data center defined by a VirtualCenter. Each server in the data center is represented as a module and can be managed as if it were a module in a physical Cisco switch.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V implementation has 2 parts:

•Virtual supervisor module (VSM) - This is the control software of the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch. It runs on a virtual machine (VM) and is based on Cisco NX-OS software.

•Virtual Ethernet module (VEM) - This is the part of Cisco Nexus 1000V that actually switches data traffic. It runs on a VMware ESX 4.0 host. Several VEMs are controlled by one VSM. All the VEMs that form a switch domain should be in the same virtual Data Center as defined by VMware VirtualCenter.