Cisco UCS: Which uplink is listening for which VLAN?

August 7, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

While troubleshooting VLAN connectivity on UCS in end-host mode with multiple uplinks, it is be good to know which uplink is the designated receiver (listener for broadcast and multicast) for which VLAN. This will be useful when you have L2 connectivity issues, where 1 or more VLANs are having issues going outside the Fabric Interconnects.

Considering the length of the command to find the designated receivers, I haven’t memorised the command itself, but the which command to find it:

UCS-FI-A(nxos)# which | inc vlandb
(2511) show platform software enm internal info vlandb { all | xlatetbl | id  }

After … Read more

Mini version of Cisco UCS Review – Part 1

July 15, 2014 / Martijn / 1 Comment

Ciscos UCS Server proposition is rocking the market (“Report: Cisco Achieves Top Rank in Americas’ x86 Blade Server Market“) of datacenter computing. Their management software and profile concepts are, dare I say it, the best out there. As an engineer, it is a delight to work with UCS. The minimal amount of effort it takes to deploy a massive computing environment is mind blowing.

The thing that makes UCS awesome, is also the thing that usually weighs it down in small deployments; the Fabric Interconnect (FI). The UCS Manager that runs on the fabric interconnect makes the entire … Read more

How to boot a UCS C-Series server from iSCSI

July 7, 2014 / Martijn / 4 Comments

When using a Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers in it’s standalone form (not connected to Fabric Interconnects, so not managed through the UCS Manager), you can boot it using a few options: local storage, fiberchannel connected storage, PXE boot and iSCSI.

When you don’t have fiberchannel at your disposal for central boot, iSCSI will do just fine.

The configuration inside the C-Series CIMC is a bit hidden though, here’s how you do it. Login to your CIMC and follow this procedure:

1. Go to Inventory
2. Select the ‘Cisco VIC Adapters’ tab
3. Select the ‘vNICs’ sub-tab
4. Click ‘Add’

Cisco UCS Inventory Script

June 30, 2014 / Martijn / 1 Comment

The UCS Inventory Script (UIS) is a tool written in Powershell (using the awesome Cisco Powertool plugin) which I’ve been using for a while in my job, gathering all the configuration data at the end of a build.

That way, I had a reference containing every detail of the UCS configuration to look back to. When an issue came around after we left, we could check back and see in what state we left UCS and if all the proper configuration was done.

Recently, I’ve started updating this script to include everything that I could think of and started adding … Read more

Disconnecting an active UCS KVM session

June 29, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

If you use UCS Manager, this has probably happened to you once or twice. Something happened on your UCS environment and you need to get KVM access to a few blades to get things working again. Then you discover one of your colleagues has left his desktop or terminal server session running with a KVM sessions open to the blades you need and you get a “Send sharing request?” dialog. Send all the sharing requests you want, that colleague is enjoying his weekend and won’t respond to them.

The way you can get around this is to reset the KVM … Read more

Ultimate Cisco Nexus FCoE Configuration Guide

June 9, 2014 / Martijn / 8 Comments

This post is part of my CCIE Datacenter reference series and will cover all there is to get FCoE up and running on the Cisco Nexus 7k, 5k and 2k switches.

The text assumes you have a understanding knowledge of fundamentals (storage paths, flogis, vPC, etc) and can be used as a configuration reference (I basically wrote this for myself).

Installing & Enabling FCoE

Nexus 7K

Installing and enabling FCoE on the Nexus 7k involves getting the storage VDC up and running. This section will cover just that.

QoS

The Nexus 7k comes with a default QoS policy of default-nq-8e-policy, … Read more

CCIE DC Progress Sheet

April 9, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When working on a large project, I tend to make overview sheets for myself to track progress. My CCIE Datacenter project is no difference. I’ve been asked to share my CCIE Datacenter progress excel sheet a bunch of times now, so I figured I’d put it here: CCIE DC Progress Sheet

It has been put together with inspiration from other sheets and it assumes you have an INE subscription for their excellent videos.