Cisco announced recently a replacement program for their B440 blades (M1 and M2)
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/ts/fn/634/fn63430.html
Something I noticed on the front of each blade, where the model is shown, the new generation blades (replacements) have the black background with the silver text, shown as the top blade on the picture below:
If you’ve set up an ESXi host, you’ve likely seen this screen:
This allows you to configure which VLAN is used for management. But what does this really do? Time after time I run into very smart engineers that primarily work on virtualization and not as much on the physical networking side – and they miss a few of the networking fundamentals that those of us that were brought up in ROUTE/SWITCH know and love.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a review of anything on the site and since I’d rather continue to make use of the category than delete it, I decided to share a piece of software I recently discovered that’s helping make my life easier.
Remote Desktop Connection Manager is essentially just that – it manages remote desktop connections. However, it does it in a way that I find appealing and EASIER to use than the native client or other organizational methods out there.
For those that have worked with any type of blade server system, you know that boot from SAN is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. Cisco UCS makes this even cooler by integrating with the service profile concept, allowing for stateless compute provisioning across the board.
I’ve done boot from SAN many times, but never with Windows. I’ve primarily used ESXi4.1 or ESXi5.0 stored on a Fibre Channel LUN, then the VMs are stored in either a FC or NFS datastore. Running a BFS for baremetal Windows isn’t something I’d explored yet.
Snapmirror is a Netapp feature that’s pretty commonly used to copy data from one system to another. You can copy volumes, or qtrees. It’s also very useful in Disaster Recovery plans, since volumes can be incrementally backed up to an offsite location.
I have a VMWare vCenter instance running on Cisco UCS that utilizes a Fibre Channel LUN to store VM templates. It’s pretty large, since it holds templates for a variety of operating systems. I was tasked with getting these VMware templates to be accessible in a completely isolated system in another part of the datacenter. None of the physical infrastructure was shared, meaning I could not simply expose this LUN to another VMware host. Rather than recreate everything all over again from images in the secondary vCenter instance and store them on a brand new LUN on the secondary Netapp array, I decided to create a situation in which the data could be snap-mirrored to the secondary array.
I recently observed some strange behavior with Cisco UCS Manager. When I visited the web page that allows me to download the .jnlp file that launches UCSM, it came up just fine. But when I clicked on “Launch UCS Manager” to actually launch this applet, the splash screen showed briefly, but disappeared after a few seconds, never to be seen again.
Eventually, you might also see some java error messages that say something like “java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protocol: socket”.
I’m currently working with a relatively large Cisco UCS installation. Initially, the system was installed and brought up to relatively recent levels of firmware, but a mismatch in the way that the firmware packages were set up in various sub-organizations on some of the UCS systems caused some of the blades to retain the old version of firmware on the M81KR adapters and the CIMC controllers.
Due to the scope of the installation, I wanted to ensure that the blades were able to continue operating while I made my changes. I have ensured that the maintenance policy that is set on each service profile (and templates) is set to “user-ack”, meaning that any change that is applied to a service profile (i.e. firmware packages) will NOT reboot the blade immediately if a reboot is required – instead it will notify me that I need to acknowledge the change, and will reboot blades as I select them.
