The UCS deployment in the Mobile VCE is different from many deployments because it does not employ many of the redundant and fault-tolerant options and doesn’t run a production workload. So, I have the flexibility to bring it down at almost any time for as long a duration as needed.
All this aside, it IS a complete Cisco UCS deployment with all the same behavior as if it were in production. This means, I can perform an upgrade or configuration change in this environment first and work through all the ramifications before performing the same action on a production environment.
There’s a lot of excitement around the web about the new features in this upgrade and I’ve been looking forward to installing it. For me, I’m excited about the lengthy list of fixes, the ability to integrate the management of the C-series server with the UCS Manager, FC port-channels and user-labels.
To start, I used the vSphere client to shut down the VMs I could and moved those I couldn’t to the C-series. Please note that I have not yet connected the C-series to the Fabric Interconnect for integration yet (that’s another post). Then I shutdown the blades themselves.
For the actual upgrade, I simply followed the upgrade guide – there’s no reason to go through the details of that here.
However, the experience was not exactly stress-free.
Although it makes sense, when the IO Module is rebooted, the Fabric Interconnect loses connection to the Chassis. It cycled through a sequence of heart-stopping error messages before finally rediscovering the chassis and servers and stabilizing. During this phase, it’s best to not look – the error messages led me to believe the IOM had become incompatible with the Fabric Interconnect. Like I said, after a few minutes, the error messages all resolved and every component was successfully updated to 1.4.1.
GUI changes after upgrade
Nodes on the Equipment tree for Rack-Mounts/FEX and Rack-Mounts/Servers
User labels (Yes! )
Summary
I’ll be connecting the C-series to the Fabric Interconnect soon and am looking forward to setting up the FC port channel.
Brian Ragazzi 