Cisco released UCS Manager 2.2

Last week Cisco released an early Christmas present, Cisco UCS Manager (code name: El Capitan), which includes a ton of new features.

For those of you who don’t know Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM), it provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) across multiple chassis, rack servers, and thousands of virtual machines. Cisco UCS Manager manages Cisco UCS as a single entity through an intuitive GUI, a command-line interface (CLI), or an XML API for comprehensive access to all Cisco UCS Manager functions.

This new release includes a ton of new features but the ones I really like are:

• Direct Connect C-Series to FI without FEX
  • Support direct connections of C-Series rack servers to the Fabric Interconnect without having to invest in a 2232PP FEX
  • Supported for the following rack servers connected with Single Wire Management and Cisco VIC 1225 adapter: C260 M2, C460 M2, C22 M3, C24 M3, C220 M3, C240 M3, C420 M3;
• Direct KVM Access
  • Direct KVM access launches KVM via URL: http://<IP_address of CIMC> or https://<IP_address of CIMC;
  • System admins allow server admins to access the KVM console without requiring the UCSM IP address;
  • The CIMC IP URLs are hosted on the Fabric Interconnect;
  • Supported over out-of-band only;
• Enhanced Local Storage Monitoring
  • Enhance monitoring capabilities for local storage, providing more granular status of RAID controllers and physical/logical drive configurations and settings
  • New Out-of-Band communication channel developed between CIMC and the RAID Controller allows for near real-time monitoring of local storage without the need for host-based utilities or additional server reboot/re-acknowledgement
  • Support monitoring the progress and state of long-running operations (e.g. RAID Rebuild, Consistency Check)
• FlexFlash (Local SD card) Support
  • UCSM provides inventory and monitoring of the FlexFlash controller and SD cards
  • Local Disk Policy contains settings to enable ‘FlexFlash RAID Reporting’
  • Number of FlexFlash SD cards is added as a qualifier for server pools
• Flash Adapters & HDD Firmware Management
  • UCSM Firmware bundles now contain Flash Adapter firmware and Local Disks firmware.
  • UCSM Host Firmware Policies can now designate desired firmware versions for Flash Adapters and Local Disks

These features really help in minimizing VDI solution stacks because you no longer need separate FEX, like Nexus 2232, to connect rack servers to the Fabric Interconnects to manage alle UCS servers, rack or blad, with one management platform. Besides that, you can now manage local storage which you regularly need with high end VDI solutions. The direct KVM Access is ideal for shared compute environments in which you now can offer customers direct KVM access without giving them direct access to your entire management network.

Besides this, Cisco UCS Manager 2.2(1) includes the following enhancements:

Fabric Enhancements:

• Fabric scaling
  • El Capitan supports new underlying NxOS switch code, which enables UCS to increase the scale numbers on the 6200 Fabric Interconnects, supporting up to 2000 VLANs, 2750 VIFs, 4000 IGMP Groups, 240 vHBAs, and 240 Network Adapter Endpoints.

• IPv6 Management Support
  • Allow management of UCS Manager and UCS servers using IPv6 addresses
  • Allow access to external services (e.g. NTP, DNS) over IPv6
  • External facing client applications (e.g. scp, ftp, tftp) and external facing services (e.g. sshd, httpd, snmpd) are now accessible over IPv6 addresses

• Uni-Directional Link Detection (UDLD) Support
  • Uni-Directional Link Detection (UDLD) is Cisco’s data link layer protocol that detects and optionally disables broken bidirectional links
  • Supported in FI End-Host and Switching mode
  • A global policy and per-port policy are added to configure UDLD parameters including: mode, msg interval, admin state, recovery action

• User Space NIC (usNIC) for Low Latency
  • UCS will support High Performance Computing (HPC) applications through a common low-latency technology based on the usNIC capability of the Cisco VICs
  • usNIC allows latency sensitive MPI applications running on bare-metal host OSes to bypass the kernel
  • Supported for Sereno-based adapters only (VIC 1240, VIC 1280, VIC 1225)

• Support for Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ)
  • Enables support for MS Windows VMQs on the Cisco VIC adapter
  • Allows a network adapter to dedicate a transmit and receive queue pair to a Hyper-V VM NIC
  • Improves network throughput by distributing processing of network traffic for multiple VMs among multiple CPUs
  • Reduces CPU utilization by offloading receive packet filtering to the network adapter

Operational Enhancements:

• Two-factor Authentication for UCS Manager Logins
  • Support for strengthened UCSM authentication, requiring a generated token along with username/password to authenticate UCSM or KVM logins
  • UCSM uses single authentication request which combines (token and password) in the password field of the authentication request

• VM-FEX for Hyper-V Management with Microsoft SCVMM
  • UCSM will support full integration with SCVMM for VM-FEX configuration
  • A Cisco provider plugin is installed in SCVMM, fetches all network definitions from UCSM and periodically polls for configuration updates
  • Supported for SCVMM 2012 SP1, Windows Hyper-V 2012 SP1 & Windows Server 2012

• CIMC In-band Management
  • CIMC management traffic takes the same path as data traffic via the FI uplink ports
  • Separate CIMC management traffic from UCSM management traffic increases bandwidth for FI management port
  • Support In-band CIMC access over IPv4/IPv6 (IPv6 access not supported Out-of-band due to NAT limitations)

• Server Firmware Auto Sync
  • Server Firmware gets automatically synchronized and updated to version configured in ‘Default Host Firmware Package’
  • Global policy allows user to configure options:
    • Auto Acknowledge (default)
    • User Acknowledge
    • No Action (feature turned off)
  • Guarantee server firmware consistency and compatibility when adding a new or RMA’ed server to a UCS domain

Compute Enhancements:

• Secure Boot
  • Establish a chain of trust on the secure boot enabled platform to protect it from executing unauthorized BIOS images
  • Secure Boot utilizes the UEFI BIOS to authenticate UEFI images before executing them
  • Standard implementation based on the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) UEFI 2.3.1 specification

• Precision Boot Order Control
  • Support creating UCSM Boot Policies with multiple instances of Boot Devices (FlexFlash, Local LUN, USB, Local/Remote vMedia, LAN, SAN, and iSCSI)
  • Provides precision and full control over the actual boot order for all devices in the system:
    • Multiple Local Boot Devices (RAID LUN/SD Card/Internal USB/External USB) and SAN
    • Local & Remote vMedia devices
    • PXE/SAN boot in multipath environments

• Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Inventory
  • Allow access to the inventory and state of the TPM module from UCSM (without having to access the BIOS via KVM)

• DIMM Blacklisting and Correctable Error Reporting
  • Improved accuracy at identifying “Degraded” DIMMs
  • DIMM Blacklisting will forcefully map-out a DIMM that hits an uncorrectable error during host CPU execution
  • Opt-in feature enabled through an optional Global Policy (Disabled by default)

The El Capitan features enable several UCS Solutions including:

• VM-FEX with SCVMM for MS Private Cloud
• Direct Connect C-Series for Smaller Big Data Clusters
• Direct Connect C-Series for Smaller VDI Deployments
• Direct Connect C-Series for FlexPod Reference Architecture with ESX 5.5
• Enhanced Local Storage Monitoring for Improved System Management Integration and SMB VDI Solutions
• PCIe Flash Cards Support for Non-Persistent VDI
• usNIC-based HPC Solutions on Cisco UCS B-Series
• Ubuntu Support for OpenStack

Links to download this release are as follows:

• Infrastructure software bundle: Click here to download
• B-series and C-series software bundles for this release are available at the above link, under “Related Software”.
• UCS Platform Emulator 2.2(1b):  Click here to download
  • NOTE:  From UCS PE 2.2(1bPE1) onwards, UCS PE supports uploading the B-Series and C-Series server firmware bundles.  Because of the large file sizes of the firmware bundles, UCS PE only supports uploading of only the stripped-down versions (attached to this document), which includes only the firmware metadata but not the actual firmware itself in the binaries.  The stripped-down version of the firmware bundles which contain metadata only of the B-series and C-series server firmware is reduced to approximately 50 kB in size.
    • Download UCSPE Firmware Bundles: UCS Platform Emulator Firmware Bundles (includes firmware meta-data only)