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8 Cool Features You May Not Know About in UCS Manager
So, you’ve probably heard about many of the cool features in our “Capitola” project (aka UCS Manager 2.0) that my colleague and good friend, Sean McGee, blogged about here:...
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Password Recovery in Cisco UCS
So, it’s no secret that almost any Cisco device can easily have the master password restored. It’s a disruptive process, but it’s well documented for each type of device (as it should be). Cisco UCS...
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UCS Boot-from-SAN Troubleshooting with the Cisco VIC (Part 2)
So, first let me define some terms….the Cisco VIC is also called “Palo” – a codename that sort of stuck (much the chagrin of the marketing team). Palo’s official name is M81KR – now do you see why...
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Appliance Ports in Cisco UCS
So, I recently had a customer that wanted to enable “Jumbo Frames” to a UCS server that had the Cisco Virtual Interface Card (VIC) installed in it (also applies to Palo/M81KR, VIC-1240, VIC-1280). You...
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Cisco UCS MTU Sizing with VIC
So, in my last article, I discussed Appliance Ports and how to set them up. But there was a hidden gem in there that I felt deserves its own article because it’s just that cool. If you’ve ever setup...
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Capturing Control Plane Traffic in UCS
So, there is a little known feature in Cisco UCS that allows one to monitor traffic on the control plane without the hassle of actually hooking up an Ethernet analyzer. The control plane is physically...
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Painless Hardware Upgrades with Cisco UCS
So, one of the huge advantages of Cisco UCS is its approach to “statelessness”. If you are not familiar with this concept, just know that anything that ties an operating system, hypervisor, or...
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Cisco UCS in a Flash
So, have you heard the news? The world’s fastest growing x86 server company is joining forces with the world’s fastest application acceleration company? While the partnership on the blade front is...
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When Disaster Strikes…
So, everyone would agree that a helping hand is nice to have now and then. Like the time I thought it would be a good idea to skateboard while holding onto my brother’s car as he drove down the...
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Resetting UCS to Factory Defaults
So, way back in early 2009, Sean McGee and I decided to work over the weekend in San Jose to get more stick time with “Project California” as UCS was called then. We borrowed a system from someone,...
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UCS Command Line Shells
So, about 2 years ago I was with a customer who had opted to purchase UCS over their incumbent HP hardware for their private cloud build. As a first step, we upgraded the firmware on the UCS system....
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ENM Source Pinning Failed – A Lesson in Disjoint Layer 2
So, today’s article is on VLAN separation, the problems it solves, and the problems it sometimes creates. Not all networks are cut from the same cloth. Some are simple and some are complex. Some are...
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Change Management with Change Tracking, Version Control… and Rollbacks
So… what we’re going to discuss here is a method by which you can implement some mechanism for change management, version control and rollback ability in UCS through service profile templates, but...
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Nexus 9508 NX-OS Upgrade Procedure
So, if you haven’t heard, I’m in a different role at Cisco. I’m now working on our Nexus 9K and ACI initiatives. It’s an exciting time to be here and feels similar to the launch we did with UCS 5...
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Fabric Interconnect booting to bash?
So, I thought I’d share an experience I had yesterday where my Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect (FI) wasn’t feeling well and in my attempt to resurrect it, I seemed to break it even more. I’m sure that...
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The Cisco Nexus 9000 – 10 Cool Features
So, the smart guys and girls in San Jose have been working day and night (literally) to bring you Cisco’s latest Nexus switch family – the Nexus 9000. It includes both the modular 9500 and the...
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Erasing a single UCS FI
So, I recently noticed that nowhere on the web (that I could find) is it documented what happens when you run “erase configuration” on a single Fabric Interconnect that is part of a cluster. Does it...
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Cool New UCS Feature–Firmware Sync
So, I had to fix a broken UCS fabric interconnect the other day and I wrote about it here. In that experience, I came across a new feature that is pretty cool. I wish I could say which version of UCS...
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Disaster is knocking–don’t let it in.
[This article was originally posted by me on March 24, 2016 on NebulousIT.com] So, anyone familiar with computers and networking knows that disasters are not a question of IF…they are not even a...
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When Disaster Strikes…
So, everyone would agree that a helping hand is nice to have now and then. Like the time I thought it would be a good idea to skateboard while holding onto my brother’s car as he drove down the...
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