Activating UCS System and Fabric Interconnect Firmware from CLI

Activating UCS System and Fabric Interconnect Firmware from CLI

I recently had to update the firmware on 2 UCS 6120XPs FIs that were on different firmware versions at the UCS Manager(USCM, also called system) level of the interconnects.  

My first step was to erase the configs on each interconnect and setup was rerun to configure the FIs in "stand-alone" mode.  Also the firmware packages were already loaded to the servers via the GUI(Please refer to the CLI documentation for steps on erasing the configuration and uploading firmware images).  To update the firmware via the CLI I used the following steps:

Direct Attached FC Storage with UCS

Cisco has released the new code release (1.4.1j). I had the chance of setting up one of the newest features included in this code release which is configuring direct attached storage from an EMC storage array directly to UCS 6120XP fabric interconnects. The process was not that difficult but there were some configurations that had to be played with to make this work properly for Boot from SAN connectivity that I have not dealt with for previous configurations with Storage connected via a fabric switch. Here are the steps we used to make this work:

UCS configuration:

1. Connect the FC storage to the FC expansion modules on the UCS 6120xp
2. In the UCS Manager, select a interconnect and in the general tab in the right pane select “Set FC Switching Mode”. Note: This will cause the Fabric Interconnects to reboot.
3. Once the UCS Manager is back online, select one of the Fabric Interconnects, then on the General tab in the right window, right click the desired FC ports of FC Expansion module and select “Configure as FC Storage Port” in the drop down
4. On the default VSAN, select “Enable Default Zoning. This allows the 6100 to communicate with the storage and vice versa for sharing the WWPN of devices.
5. Next, configure the boot policy for the host.