UCS Archives - Lostdomain

Updated: Cisco UCS Inventory Script

April 24, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

A few years ago, I created the first version of the Cisco UCS Inventory Script (UIS), a PowerShell script to read all the configuration and environment data from a UCS Manager. It can help you to get an easy overview of UCS installations after completing the initial build, or on an ongoing basis. To answer basic questions like “How many port licenses do we have left?” or “Did we create VLAN X?” – when you have no easy connectivity to the management console.

Next to reporting configuration and environment data, it also provides some basic recommendations about the configuration.

The … Read more

Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex

March 1, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco has just announced a new line of HyperConverged appliances called HyperFlex. With this announcement, Cisco has officially entered the HyperConverged market with an appliance with integrated compute, storage and network.

The HyperFlex line initially consists of three flavours and features the hardware of the existing Unified Computing System (UCS), coupled with a hypervisor (initially VMware vSphere, eventually Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM), a software defined storage solution from SpringPath (licensed for HyperFlex) and the networking solutions of UCS.

The three flavours of HyperFlex consists of a minimum of four nodes of either UCS C220 M4, C240 M4 or B200 M4 … Read more

Cisco UCS Manager Finally gets HTML5 interface

April 4, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco released version 3.0(2c) (release notes here) of its UCS Infrastructure and UCS Manager software (still UCS Mini only) on the 13th of March, and it has 3 new major features: Fibre channel NPV mode, Ethernet switch mode and a HTML5 web interface for UCS Manager.

While the FC NPV and Ethernet switch modes are pretty exciting as well, they are basically just ports from regular UCS. The HTML5 web interface is an entire new feature, which eliminates the need for java. No more keeping different versions of java, activating an older version when you need to login to … Read more

Cisco UCS Mini – a deep dive

February 7, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

In September 2014, Cisco launched the UCS Mini for what they dubbed “Edge-Scale Computing”. The UCS Mini offering is a stripped down version of the classic UCS system with Fabric Interconnects. To learn about classic UCS, click here.

In this post I will go into some details about the UCS Mini that I’ve learned over the past few months. The information here will assume you have the basic knowledge about what the UCS Mini is and what components are involved. If you need a refresher, I’ve written up a small introduction here.

Let’s dive in.

Fabric Interconnect

The … Read more

Cisco UCS B-Series CPU Upgrades – WILL_BOOT_FAULT

September 21, 2014 / Martijn / 3 Comments

UCS is different then other server platforms, which sometimes makes simple maintenance tasks not as straightforward as you’d think. We had an truckload of CPU upgrades last week. A regular server admin would think; “Hey, I just take this old CPU out and put this new CPU in and bob’s my uncle!” – well, UCS might have a surprise for you.

One of my colleagues (a ‘traditional’ server guy) handled this replacement and was confronted with an error message when reinserting the blades: WILL_BOOT_FAULT (awesome description once again, Cisco). Considering the error message itself, they went looking for boot issues. … Read more

Cisco UCS Grand Slam Announcements

September 4, 2014 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco held a “UCS Grandslam” today, where they announced some amazing new UCS products and announced a few refreshers of the UCS family. I think “Grand Slam” is a baseball term (not american 😉 ), because there was a pretty cool presentation from the major league baseball on how they are using the Internet of Things (IoT) to further the multimedia experience of baseball.

On to the important stuff! Cisco is refreshing and expanding the UCS family with a few new awesome things:

UCS Mini. Smaller UCS Pod, with built-in Fabric Interconnects (check my review a while

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

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