To continue my series of posts on building the framework for a functional lab environment, I'd like to talk about the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator (UCSPE). It is a software appliance packaged as a vSphere OVA that approximates a UCS deployment, including the networking components (a pair of switches called the Fabric Interconnects) and both blade and rackmount UCS servers (B- and C-Series, respectively). It can be a great tool for learning and becoming more familiar with the UCS platform. I will be deploying my UCSPE on vSphere 6.7 in my lab, but it should work similarly in other recent versions. 1. Start by downloading the UCS Platform Emulator OVA from https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-71877 - you will need a Cisco Connection Online (CCO) login in order to begin the download. I am using version 3.1(2ePE1) of the emulator for this guide as that appeared to be the latest version available at the time of writing. Side note, I also noticed during the boot process that this ver