Cisco UCS B/C Servers

while installing a new Cisco UCS system with the one of the newer builds of the firmware which was 2.0(1s) we were getting an error with both chassis which said they were in an unsupported-connectivity state.  The config that we setup was pretty basic and straight forward.  We have two UCS Fabric Interconnects, with two chassis, and two cables from each blade in each chassis going to the Fabric Interconnects.  There’s a diagram over there…

BACKING UP UCS Backing up UCS can be a little confusing especially since it presents you a few options.  What you may be expecting is something simple like a one button easy “Back it up” button.  But in fact, that is not the case.  And the nice thing about it is there are lots of different things you can do with backup files. From the Admin Tab under All in UCS Manager, under the general…

Backup and Export Configuration When you perform a backup through Cisco UCS Manager, you take a snapshot of all or part of the system configuration and export the file to a location on your network. You cannot use Cisco UCS Manager to back up data on the servers. You can perform a backup while the system is up and running. The backup operation only saves information from the management plane. It does not have any impact on the…

Original Link # http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/07/ucs-2-0-cisco-stacks-the-deck-in-las-vegas/ In addition to the existing UCS fabric hardware, UCS customers now have a choice of a new Fabric Interconnect, a new chassis I/O module, and a new Virtual Interface Card.  The 6248UP Fabric Interconnect delivers double the throughput, almost half the latency, and more than quadruple the virtual interfaces per downlink, while the new 2208XP chassis I/O module delivers double the chassis uplink bandwidth and quadruple the server downlinks.  Last but not…

Booting UCS C from FlexFlash We installed a few UCS C220M3s the other day and opted to boot from the 16GB FlexFlash SD card.  The confusing part of the FlexFlash is that it’s broken down into four partitions: SCU — The server can access the Cisco UCS Server Configuration Utility. Drivers — The server can access the Cisco drivers. HV — The server can access a user-installed hypervisor. HUU — The server can access the Cisco…

Cisco Nexus B22HP FEX Deployment Guide It seems that Cisco hasn’t completed ticked off HP with their UCS line of servers, because they were able to collaborate on a fabric extender for the HP C-series chassis, the Nexus B22HP.  A fabric extender is a Cisco Nexus switch (typically a Nexus 2000) that is managed via an upstream Nexus 5500 switch.  It allows you to scale out your top of rack (TOR) switches and still manage them…

Cisco UCS Direct-Attached SAN New in Cisco UCS firmware 2.1 is the ability to directly-attached a fiber-channel SAN to the Fabric Interconnects; to see all the other cool features head on over to UCS Guru’s blog.  A few years ago, Cisco supported this very briefly before changing their minds because your sole method of governing access to the SAN was LUN Masking and not zoning.  In firmware 2.1 Cisco flipped the switch and added support for…