Introducing Cisco UCSM
Cisco UCSM provides unified management of all hardware and software components for the Cisco UCS solution. UCSM also provides both graphical and command line user interfaces and is embedded into Fabric Interconnects (FIs).
UCSM controls multiple UCS chassis. The number of chassis that can be controlled by UCSM is 20, but the actual number of manageable chassis is dependent upon the model and the number of physical uplinks from each chassis' Input Output Module (IOM) or Fabric Extender (FEX) module to FIs. UCSM provides unified visibility and management for servers, network, and storage resources. The core functions that UCSM provides are as follows:
- Identity and resource pools: UCSM provides identity and resource pools to abstract the compute node identities for the stateless servers whereas traditional servers use the hardware burned-in identities. These identities and resources include Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), Media Access Controls (MACs), World Wide Node (WWN) numbers, and physical blade server pools.
- Policies: Service policies provide different configurations for UCS servers including BIOS settings, firmware versions, Virtual Network Interface Cards (vNICs), Virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBAs) policies, scrub policies, Quality Of Service (QOS), Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) policies, and so on. A policy once configured can be assigned to any number of blade servers in order to provide the configuration baseline.
- Templates: A template is an excellent feature of UCSM that assists on provisioning multiple physical servers, vNICs, and vHBAs with similar hardware configuration through a single source. A template can be configured for each type of server in the environment, different vNICs, and vHBAs as per the business requirement. Templates can be used to create services profiles, vNICs, and vHBAs for the servers very quickly.
- Service profiles: Service profile is the principal feature of the UCS platform that enables stateless computing. It combines information and features abstracted from identity and resource pools and server policies. It is a software entity residing in UCSM, which has the specifications of a complete server when associated with a stateless physical hardware server. Service profiles radically improve server provisioning and troubleshooting.
UCSM provides the following benefits:
- Agility: With an appropriate initial configuration, UCSM facilitates the system administrator with rapid provisioning of any number of new chassis and blade servers using resource pools, policies, and templates to create service profiles.
- Flexibility: UCSM abstracts hardware resources using software configurations. A system administrator can quickly modify vNICs, vHBAs, and other resources using software configurations.
- Troubleshooting: Since UCS hardware is stateless, in case of catastrophic failures, servers can be replaced with all the existing identities and configurations without having to deal with lengthy configuration steps.
UCSM firmware version
The most recent UCSM firmware version available at the time of writing this book was UCSM 2.1. Always check the Cisco website for acquiring the most recent firmware. It is required to have a CCO account and authorization in order to download the UCSM firmware. Older firmware versions are also available in the archive area of the same web page.
Following are the major firmware releases:
- UCSM Version 1.4
- UCSM Version 2.0
- UCSM Version 2.1
For each major release, there are some minor revisions as well. When performing a firmware upgrade, always read the firmware release notes carefully in order to avoid breaking a production environment. For example, if you have configured default SAN zoning (not recommended but configurable in Version 2.0) for production systems running on firmware Version 2.0, upgrading to firmware Version 2.1 will break the SAN access unless proper zoning is configured, as default zoning is not an option in Version 2.1.