Release Notes for Cisco UCS Manager, Release 1.2(1)
Available Languages
Table Of Contents
Release Notes for Cisco UCS Manager, Release 1.2(1)
Updating the Cisco UCS Firmware
Hardware and Software Interoperability
Known Limitations and Behaviors
Caveats from Previous Releases
New Hardware Features in Release 1.2(1)
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Release Notes for Cisco UCS Manager, Release 1.2(1)
First Published: March 29, 2010
Latest Update: May 24, 2010Part Number: OL-22187-01This document describes the new features, system requirements, and caveats for Cisco UCS Manager, Release 1.2(1b), Release 1.2(1d), and all related firmware on blade servers and other Unified Computing System components associated with that release. Use this document in conjunction with the documents listed in the "Related Documentation" section.
Note
We sometimes update the documentation after original publication. Therefore, you should also review the documentation on Cisco.com for any updates. Documentation updates and errata are also in these release notes. The documentation roadmap for this product is available at: http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing/b-series-doc
Table 1 shows the online change history for this document.
Table 1 Online History Change
OL-22187-01
A0
March 29, 2010
Created release notes for Release 1.2(1b).
B0
May 24, 2010
Updated release notes for Release 1.2(1d).
Contents
This document includes the following sections:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Introduction
The Cisco® Unified Computing System is a next-generation data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.
System Requirements
Cisco UCS Manager must meet or exceed the following minimum system requirements:
•
•
–
–
•
–
–
–
Updating the Cisco UCS Firmware
To update the Cisco UCS software and firmware, refer to the following documents:
•
•
•
The upgrade procedure from earlier releases to Release 1.2.1c will be same as it was to 1.2.1b.
Use the scope firmware and show package filename expand CLI commands to view the contents of a given release package.
Hardware and Software Interoperability
For detailed information about storage switch, operating system, adapter, adapter utility, and storage array interoperability, see the Hardware and Software Interoperability Matrix for this release, located at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10477/prod_technical_reference_list.html
Note
Known Limitations and Behaviors
Adapters
A UCS B250 Extended Memory Blade Server can hold two mezzanine cards, but they must be the same type. Mixed configurations are not supported.
To deploy two UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Cards on the UCS B250 Extended Memory Blade Server running ESX 4.0 you will need to upgrade to patch 5 (ESX4.0u1p5) or later release of ESX 4.0.
(CSCtd32884 and CSC71310) The type of adapter in a server impacts the maximum MTU supported. Network MTU above the maximums may cause the packet to be dropped for the following adapters:
· The Cisco UCS CNA M71KR adapter supports a maximum MTU of 9216.
· The Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI adapter supports a maximum MTU of 14000.
Fabric Interconnect
When trying to install ESX on a server blade, Port Security should be disabled on the corresponding vNIC on the UCS Manager service profile. Otherwise, installation will fail as Port Security will secure only the first MAC address and drop traffic that is sourced with a different MAC address.
Recovering the Corrupt BIOS on a Server
Before you attempt to recover a corrupt BIOS, remove all attached or mapped USB storage from a server. If an external USB drive is attached or mapped from vMedia to the server, BIOS recovery fails.
SSD
Seagate SATA disks and Intel or Samsung SATA SSDs are not supported in release 1.2(1) and will not be part of B200 or B250 M1 or M2 Servers using release 1.2(1).
UCS Manager
The display of NIC statistics is actually the average, minimum and maximum of the change since the last collection. If the values are 0, there has been no change since the last collection.
UCSM GUI
HDD metrics (displayed in the GUI Storage Tab) are not displayed after you hot-swap or remove and reinsert the HDD. This is because the UCS Manager reads the HDD metricsat boot time. This does not impact operation of the HDD, the rest of UCS, or UCS Manager functionality. Re-associate a service profile or re-acknowledge a server to cause a boot that will discover the new HDD metrics.
UCSM GUI and Boot Order
The Configured Boot Order tab shows the boot order assigned to the server. The Actual Boot Order tab shows exactly what will boot from the various devices in the configuration.
Note
Passwords
Choose a strong password. If a password is not strong, UCSM does not allow it to be set as a local user password. UCSM enforces following rules for a strong password:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Management GUI
When Java Web Start is not configured properly the exception: "BadFieldException" is thrown by Java Web Start when launching the KVM viewer. This is the default behavior of Java Web Start for any application that uses native libraries when the java web start cache is disabled. The workaround is to select control panel -> java -> General tab -> Temporary Internet Files -> Settings -> and then select "Keep temporary files on my computer" -> OK.
After the initial configuration, you can change the management IP port and the related subnet mask in Cisco UCS Manager CLI. You cannot make this change in Cisco UCS Manager GUI.
When several KVM Consoles are launched, the SUN JRE sometimes reports an error and the KVM Console may fail to launch. Launch the KVM Console again to resolve this issue.
When waking up a computer from sleep, UCS Manager GUI will detect an event sequencing error and display the error: "Event Sequencing is skewed" because the JRE doesn't have a sleep detection mechanism. Always shut down UCS Manager GUI before putting your computer to sleep.
KVM may fail to open by the first try on a blade. This bug is caused by JRE 1.6_11, see: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6741349 To resolve this, upgrade to JRE 1.6_12 or higher.
Boot Order
You should set only one bootable Storage device which is either local disk or SAN boot and to do it only from UCSM. To assure reliable SAN boot operation, the local disks must be physically removed from the server or servers. If the local disk and SAN boot are both present in the boot order, then the association will fail.
In the Cisco UCS Manager GUI, if the Reboot on boot Order Change check box is checked for a boot policy, and if CD-ROM or Floppy is the last device in the boot order, then deleting or adding the device does not directly affect the boot order and the server does not reboot.
The use of the terms primary or secondary boot devices while creating a service profile does not imply a boot order. The effective order of boot devices within the same devie class is determined by PCIe bus scan order.
RHEL
When Using RHEL 4.8, the system cannot see a USB drive mapped through virtual media.The kernel needs to be rebuilt with max_luns option set to 255 in modprobe.conf, refer to the article at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-3293
SNMP
SNMP shows the fabric interconnect name rather than the system name. There is no workaround.
An SNMP user name can not be the same as a local user name. Select an SNMP user name that does not match any local user name.
TFTP
Downloads may be slow if TFTP is used. If TFTP performance is slow, use SCP or another protocol.
VM Migration
After a VM is powered off or migrated to a different host, the vSphere Client prevents the power on or migration of the VM to the same host and it reports the error: "Currently connected network interface <x> uses Distributed Virtual Switch (uuid: <y>) which is accessed on the host via a switch that has no free ports." This is most likely to occur when the cumulative number of virtual NICs associated with the VMs powered on a host approaches the number of dynamic vNICs configured in the service profile of the host. UCS Manager configures the number of ports allowed for the DVS on an ESX host to match the number of dynamic vNICs configured in the service profile of the server. After a VM is powered off or migrated to a different ESX host, vSphere Server should recompute the "numPortsAvailable" property in the "hostProxySwitch" object. In the problem scenario, the numPortsAvailable remains zero. After migrating a second VM away from the ESX host, it is possible to power on or migrate a VM on the ESX host.
When attempting to migrate a VM powered on a server to a different data-store on the same server, the vSphere Client prevents the migration and it reports the error: "Currently connected network interface <x> uses Distributed Virtual Switch (uuid: <y>) which is accessed on the host via a switch that has no free ports." This happens when the cumulative number of virtual NICs of the VMs powered on an ESX host matches or exceeds the number of dynamic vNICs configured in the service profile of the server. UCS Manager configures the number of ports allowed for the DVS on an ESX host to match the number of dynamic vNICs configured in the service profile on the server. As result of attempting the VM migration, vSphere Server incorrectly detects an increase in the number of DVS ports used by VMs powered on the host. Shut down VMs on the ESX host and retry the migration.
When changing a template type from initial to updating and at the same time modifying a reboot-causing value, the list of dependencies (i.e. the servers that are affected by the change) is not returned by the back-end so there is no reboot warning. To avoid this. change the template type from initial to updating. After submitting this change (press "Apply Changes") perform the other desired changes, and an appropriate warning with the correct list of dependencies will be displayed.
Resolved Caveats
The following caveats are resolved for the 1.2(1d) release:
Cisco UCS Manager
•
•
Fabric Interconnect
•
•
The following caveats are resolved for the 1.2(1b) release:
Red Hat Linux
•
XML API
•
Cisco UCS Manager
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
UCS Manager GUI
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
BIOS
•
•
•
Fabric Interconnect
•
•
•
•
•
Adapters
•
•
•
VMWare
•
Open Caveats
The following caveats are open for Release 1.2(1):
Adapters
Symptom When ESX4i is installed on a UCS blade with a M81KR Adapter, or on a Fiber Channel LUN, or ESX4i is upgraded from Update1 to Update1 Patch03/Patch04/Patch05, the Upgrade or Install of ESX4i or Cisco VEM module may fail with the following error mesage: "
Message - Bootbank preparation failed: /sbin/bootbankstage-install.sh -v prep returned (1) Errno - 17 Description - There was an error setting up ESXi installation destination"Workaround
Red Hat Linux
Symptom Loading multiple driver disks during a RHEL 5.x installation fails.
Workaround
Symptom When using the Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card and Large Receive Offload (LRO), you may encounter a panic when traffic forwarding and LRO are enabled with RHEL 5.4 - xen kernel.
Workaround
Symptom Network usage (scp, ftp, web browsing, etc.) causes a kernel panic on the RHEL5.4 Xen kernel (2.6.18-164.el5xen)
Workaround
Symptom When a vNIC is not in failover mode and a link down event occurs, the network traffic on the blades is disrupted with a system running RHEL 5.3.
Workaround
1.
service network restartor
ifdown ethxifup ethx2.
•
•
•
Note that network performance may be affected since the system is running in legacy mode. (CSCte44548)
Symptom Pass-through DMA Support selection is not available in the BIOS if it was Disabled prior to the BIOS upgrade. If you had this option Disabled in previous version, the selection is hidden in the updated BIOS.
Workaround
Local Disk/RAID
Symptom A mirrored RAID cluster moved from one blade to another blade will not boot correctly and will be reported as a foreign RAID.
Workaround
Symptom After the removal or insertion of one or more local disks, their full discovery fails.
Workaround
Symptom The Disk Fault/Error Codes, Disk Status, Alarms and the failures forwarded by the SAS Controller are not received by Cisco UCS Manager.
Workaround
Symptom FSM gets stuck in an Error Configuring the Local Disk Controller state due to various underlying conditions. Those can include but are not limited to the following:
•
•
Workaround
Symptom The disk scrub policy does not meet DoD compliance.
Workaround
BIOS
Symptom Hubs ethat only use USB 1.0 may not properly present an attached USB device to the UCS server.
Workaround
Symptom With the B-250 blade server, the displayed ESX and Linux OS HDD Boot Device Order is the reverse of the BIOS HDD Boot Order.
Workaround
Symptom When memory mirroring configuration is disabled by removing a DIMM, the BIOS will switch to the Performance mode, and will not log a SEL that mirroring was disabled.
Workaround
Symptom When a faulty DIMM is detected in early BIOS POST (e.g. the blade was powered on with a faulty DIMM), two SEL entries will be sent to the BMC. One entry will be logged for each DIMM.
Workaround
Symptom When hot plugging or removing USB devices at a BIOS Setup -> Advanced -> USB screen, the Setup Utility may freeze.
Workaround
Symptom When a NIC is not present in the system, or is not part of the boot order, the BIOS produces the prompt "Press F12 to boot from the Network".
Workaround
Symptom If a single DIMM in a channel is marked faulty during BIOS POST, the entire channel is marked faulty. Even empty DIMM slots can be marked faulty.
Workaround
Symptom Under certain conditions after clearing the CMOS, Service Profile disassociation might take up to 20 FSM iterations to finish, the virtual media KVM interface might incorrectly indicate it will boot to the EFI Shell, or the BIOS boot-order table might contain only the EFI-shell as a boot option.
Workaround
enter scrub-policy <any name>set bios-settings-scrub no <---set descr ""set disk-scrub no(CSCtc44331)
Symptom Installing EFI Native SLES 11 is not supported in this release.
Workaround
Symptom Disabling USB 2.0 through Advanced->USB could result in inconsistent information on that particular page. Some devices may not show up as expected. This does not results in functional degradation during POST.
Workaround
Symptom After resetting the CMOS the system date needs to be reset to current.
Workaround
Red Hat Linux
Symptom Network usage (e.g. SCP, FTP, web browsing, etc.) causes a kernel panic on RHEL5.4 Xen kernel (2.6.18-164.el5xen).
Workaround
Adapters
Symptom The link between the Switch and the Adapter appears to be flapping continuously. This typically occurs when a large number of VMs (30) are "Powered On" simultaneously from the Virtual Sphere Client GUI.
Workaround
Symptom With a server booting from SAN, a server crash may occur when an FC HBA is reset, or when a WWPN is zoned in or out on a core fabric switch, or a link flap event occurs either between the NPV switch and the host, or between the NPV switch and the core switch, or the core switch and storage. The symptoms of this problem include server hangs during normal operation, whether or not I/Os happen. It may either remain hung, or may panic and reboot. Upon a reboot, a vmcore file may or may not be present in /var/crash/ depending on whether sync to disk succeeded or not. Alternatively, the server may not crash or hang but can encounter a journal commit I/O error and the boot partition (located on a SAN LUN) will become a read-only file system. The server stays up, but nothing can be written to the necessary partition.
Workaround
Symptom When a DCBXP peer on a physical interface sends two different unique identifiers in the Protocol data unit in the same session, a DCBXP process error disables the port.
Workaround
scope chassis <Chassis Id>scope server <Server Id>scope adapter <Adapter Id>scope ext-eth-if <Id>set adminstate reset-connectivitycommit-bufferWait for a minute, the port will come up.(CSCsx42435)
KVM
Symptom Sometimes keyboard strokes pressed during the boot sequence are ignored by the KVM Application. This occurs because the KVM Tab is not currently selected.
Workaround
Symptom During the Server Power-State Management, the KVM session may be aborted with a message displaying "Network Connection Dropped".
Workaround
Cisco UCS Manager
Symptom Information about the number of CPU cores enabled is unavailable. Along with the other processor information, the UCS manager GUI and CLI don't show this info.
Workaround
Symptom A SMASH Command with an incorrect option should result in an"INVALID OPTION" error.
Workaround
Symptom The PCIe Address for the Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card is not seen in the GUI (or CLI). It causes no functional impact.
Workaround
Symptom Modification of trusted CoS policy in Service Profile does not get immediately applied to the server. If you modify the trusted CoS policy of an adapter profile in a service profile that is currently attached to a physical server, a server reboot is needed. Since it is unsafe to automatically reboot an associated server, UCSM currently does not.
Workaround
Symptom Environment statistics for IO Module 1 are not shown.
Workaround
Symptom For each Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, 2 interfaces show up in the OS and ethtool reports Link Detected = yes for both of them. This is only seen on Cisco UCS B250 servers.
Workaround
Symptom One vNIC defined in the service profile boot order results in two BIOS vNICs.
Workaround
Symptom After a full restore of the primary fabric interconnect, the subordinate fabric interconnect installation may temporarily fail with the following message:
Enter the admin password of the peer switch:Connecting to peer switch... unable to connect! Password could be wrong.Hit enter to try again or type 'restart' to start setup from beginning...Workaround
Symptom When the time-based UUID generation method is used in the UUIDgen tool, the system reports duplicate UUIDs because UUIDs are validated based on their suffix, whereas the time-stamp method creates UUIDs with unique prefixes, but non-unique suffixes.
Workaround
Symptom For a given port profile with existing VIFs, if the "Max-Ports" setting is reduced from the currently configured value to a value less than the "Used-Ports" value reported for that port profile by VMware vCenter, this is a mis-configuration. The new value for "Max-Ports" for that port profile will only be updated in Cisco UCS Manager and its update in VMware Center will fail, causing a inconsistency between Cisco UCS Manager and VMware Center Server.
Workaround
Symptom When a service profile containing 2 vNICs and having failover enabled is applied to some adapters, the fail back timeout specified in the adapter policy for the second vNIC has no effect. The fail back timeout specified in the adapter policy and applied to the first vNIC is applied to the whole adapter and effective for both vNICs.
Workaround
Symptom Cisco UCS Manager reports incorrect v NICs or VIFs associated with a given Virtual Machine if and only if the Virtual Machine is deployed from VMware Center in Fault-Tolerance (Active-Standby) mode and the Virtual Machine happens to be the standby or FT Virtual Machine.
Workaround
Symptom When firmware is updated, UCSM accepts another firmware update before the completion of the current update. The new request will fail silently and lock out the selected firmware package for the next update.
Workaround
Cisco UCS Manager GUI
Symptom When upgrading from releases prior to 1.1.1, OS-specific default adapter policies will not have the current recommended default values.
Workaround
Eth VMWare->RSS: DisabledEth VMWarePassThru->RSS: EnabledEth default->RSS: EnabledFC (all)->FCP Error Recovery: DisabledFC (all)->Flogi Retries: 8FC (all)->Flogi Timeout: 4000FC (all)->Plogi Timeout: 20000FC (all)->IO Throttle Count: 16FC (all)->Max LUNs Per Target: 256(CSCte58155)
Symptom All DIMMs are reported to be in array 1, and the max memory for a blade is reported as 192GB.
Workaround
Symptom The UCSM GUI could show all DIMMs to be in array 1, and maximum memory for a blade of 192GB for a B200.
Workaround
Symptom Hardware revision numbers for fabric interconnect components are not populated in the Cisco UCS Manager.
Workaround
Symptom In the Cisco UCS Manager GUI, you can only select port channels and individual uplink ports as pin targets, but the Cisco UCS Manager CLI allows you to also select port channel member ports as pin targets.
Workaround
Symptom Even though there are no POST failures in the chassis, Cisco UCS Manager may sometimes display the overall status of the chassis as POST-failure.
Workaround
Symptom Statistics counters cannot be cleared using Cisco UCS Manager CLI.
Workaround
Symptom The assignment of servers to dynamic pools do not automatically occur.
Workaround
Symptom When a cluster configuration is set up such that I/O module 1 is cabled to fabric interconnect B and I/O module 2 is cabled to fabric interconnect A, then the Ethernet devices are given ports 1 and 0. However if the setup is straight, with I/O Module 1 connected to fabric interconnect A and I/O Module 2 to fabric interconnect B, then the devices are assigned ports 0 and 1.
Workaround
Symptom When checking for UUID uniqueness, currently only the UUID suffix is checked.
Workaround
Symptom System takes several minutes to initialize when a large number of virtual interfaces is configured. When a system with a large number of virtual interfaces is rebooted, it can take several minutes to initialize and complete configuration of the virtual interfaces
Workaround
Symptom In a Cisco UCS instance with five or more chassis, the following sequence of events may cause the system to not be in high availability ready state for a period of up to five minutes:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Workaround
Symptom Logon access is denied for user accounts where the password field was left blank during user account creation.
Workaround
Symptom When a fabric interconnect moves from standalone mode to cluster mode the virtual IP Address may be overwritten by the out of band IP of the primary fabric-interconnect. This issue happens only if the out of band IP was modified in stand alone mode before changing the mode to cluster.
Workaround
Symptom When more than 10 Cisco UCS Manager GUI sessions are open at the same time with remote authentication for a long time (typically for a few hours), one of the Cisco UCS Manager GUI sessions may fail to re-authenticate. This causes the session that fails the re-authentication to close. The problem does not happen when local authentication is in use.
Workaround
Symptom If you move from subnet A to subnet B then do a cluster failover and move back to subnet A, a Virtual IP is no longer pingable.
Workaround
scope systemset set virtual-ip <new address>commit(CSCtc55636)
Fabric Interconnect
Symptom Without pin group configuration, server interfaces are pinned to uplink interfaces of the fabric interconnect dynamically and the pinning is redistributed as uplink interfaces go up or down. In some situations, the distribution of server interfaces across uplink interfaces is not balanced. Potential impact is some uplinks are under utilized.
Workaround
Symptom At bootup of the fabric interconnect, the following message will be displayed on the console: "The startup-config won't be used until the next reboot."
Workaround
Symptom Console login is treating the admin and ADMIN account as the same. Console login name on the fabric interconnect is not case sensitive, so there is no differentiation between e.g. 'admin' and 'ADMIN'.
Workaround
Symptom When you set a TFTP core exporter IP address through Cisco UCS Manager, the fabric interconnect accepts the address even if it is malformed, e.g 1.2.3.412. This does not pose any functional impact to core exporter with valid IP addresses.
Workaround
Symptom Under high stress on the system with repeated port flapping and a default or native VLAN changing simultaneously, a process may cause the fabric interconnect to reload.
Workaround
Symptom The show cdp neighbor command does not display information for CDP neighbors seen from the management interface, nor does it display the fabric interconnect CDP information corresponding to the management interface.
Workaround
Symptom Under some circumstances, system messages are not shown on the terminal monitor even though logging on terminal monitor is enabled globally and on a particular session.
Workaround
Symptom With FM/DM version 5.0(0.295) and UCS 1.1 release, a security user defined in Cisco UCS Manager does not get displayed on FM/DM.
Workaround
UCS Manager CLI
Symptom The UUID of the VM changes in VMware vCenter. After a VM restarts, the virtual machine node on the VM tab shows multiple instances of the same VM with one online and one offline.
Workaround
Symptom If multiple vHBA initiators are configured in the same zone so that they are visible to each other and can login to each other, and storage multipathing is not configured with active and standby paths through the Cisco UCS fabric interconnects (There is only one path through the primary fabric interconnect), and the primary fabric interconnect is rebooted, the vHBA driver can be exposed to a situation in which two initiators can try to login to each other at the same time, and cause a host crash.
Workaround
Symptom ESX Read and Write commands sent on a vHBA keep timing out and being aborted even if the target device is logged into the network. This can happen if the link flaps very fast from up to down to up and memory allocation for the link event fails. The vHBA driver misses the link down event and it does not re-login to the fabric interconnect. The fabric interconnect, however, has no login state for the vHBA and so drops all packets from the vHBA.
Workaround
TFTP
Symptom When downloading an image or bundle using tftp, the download task appears to be stuck at 2% or sometimes fails completely. TFTP download can fail or appear stuck if the bundle is too large. It almost always appears to fail with the current bundle which is 450MB in size. If any image is downloaded individually, should succeed.
Workaround
Caveats from Previous Releases
Release 1.1(1)
The following caveat is open for Release 1.1(1l), most Release 1.1(1j) caveats also apply unless they are listed as resolved for Release 1.1(1l):
Symptom Pass-through DMA Support selection is not available in the BIOS if it was Disabled prior to the BIOS upgrade. If you had this option Disabled in previous version, the selection is hidden in the updated BIOS.
Workaround
This section lists the open caveats in release 1.1(1j).
BIOS
Symptom Low Voltage DIMMs marked as Identity Not Established and are not included in the PID catalog.
Workaround
Symptom Sometimes keyboard strokes pressed during the boot sequence are ignored by the KVM Application.
Workaround
Symptom With the B-250 blade server, the displayed ESX and Linux OS HDD Boot Device Order is the reverse of the BIOS HDD Boot Order.
Workaround
Symptom When memory mirroring configuration is disabled by removing a DIMM, BIOS will switch to the Performance mode, and will not log a SEL that mirroring was disabled.
Workaround
Symptom When a faulty DIMM is detected in early BIOS POST (e.g. the blade was powered on with a faulty DIMM), two SEL entries will be sent to the BMC. One entry will be logged for each DIMM.
Workaround
Symptom When hot plugging or removing USB devices at a BIOS Setup -> Advanced -> USB screen, the Setup Utility may freeze.
Workaround
Symptom When a NIC is not present in the system, or is not part of the boot order, the BIOS produces the prompt "Press F12 to boot from the Network".
Workaround
Symptom If a single DIMM in a channel is marked faulty during BIOS POST, the entire channel is marked faulty. Even empty DIMM slots can be marked faulty.
Workaround
Symptom Installing EFI Native SLES 11 is not supported in this release.
Workaround
Symptom Disabling USB 2.0 through Advanced->USB could result in inconsistent information on that particular page. Some devices may not show up as expected. This does not results in functional degradation during POST.
Workaround
Symptom FSM gets stuck in an Error Configuring the Local Disk Controller state due to various underlying conditions. Those can include but are not limited to the following:
•
•
Workaround
Symptom The Disk Fault/Error Codes, Disk Status, Alarms and the failures forwarded by the SAS Controller are not received by Cisco UCS Manager.
Workaround
Symptom After resetting the CMOS the system date needs to be reset to current.
Workaround
Symptom After moving a mirrored RAID cluster from one server to another server, it fails to boot and is reported as a foreign RAID.
Workaround
Red Hat Linux
Symptom Network usage (e.g. SCP, FTP, web browsing, etc.) causes a kernel panic on RHEL5.4 Xen kernel (2.6.18-164.el5xen).
Workaround
Symptom When a vNIC is not in failover mode and a link down event occurs, the network traffic on the blades is disrupted with a system running RHEL 5.3.
Workaround
1.
service network restartor
ifdown ethxifup ethx2.
•
•
•
Note that network performance may be affected since the system is running in legacy mode. (CSCte44548)
Symptom When using the Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card and Large Receive Offload (LRO), you may encounter a panic when traffic forwarding and LRO are enabled with RHEL 5.4 - xen kernel.
Workaround
Adapters
Symptom When a DCBXP peer on a physical interface sends two different unique identifiers in the Protocol data unit in the same session, a DCBXP process error disables the port.
Workaround
scope chassis <Chassis Id>scope server <Server Id>scope adapter <Adapter Id>scope ext-eth-if <Id>set adminstate reset-connectivitycommit-bufferWait for a minute, the port will come up.(CSCsx42435)
KVM
Symptom During the Server Power-State Management, the KVM session may be aborted with a message displaying "Network Connection Dropped".
Workaround
Cisco UCS Manager
Symptom UCSM 1.1.(1j) firmware activation during UCS firmware upgrade will result in a server. reboot. Customers upgrading their systems from the 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 release to the 1.1(1j) release will experience an unexpected server reboot upon UCSM component activation. This is a result of an incorrect setting of the internal VNIC/VHBA property called lifecycle, that makes the system believe that reconfiguration of these objects is required. This reconfiguration triggers a server reboot.
Workaround
Note
Note
Symptom The disk scrub policy does not meet DoD compliance.
Workaround
Symptom After the removal or insertion of one or more local disks, their full discovery fails.
Workaround
Symptom One vNIC defined in the service profile boot order results in two BIOS vNICs.
Workaround
Symptom After a full restore of the primary fabric interconnect, the subordinate fabric interconnect installation may temporarily fail with the following message:
Enter the admin password of the peer switch:Connecting to peer switch... unable to connect! Password could be wrong.Hit enter to try again or type 'restart' to start setup from beginning...Workaround
Symptom When the time-based UUID generation method is used in the UUIDgen tool, the system reports duplicate UUIDs because UUIDs are validated based on their suffix, whereas the time-stamp method creates UUIDs with unique prefixes, but non-unique suffixes.
Workaround
Symptom For a given port profile with existing VIFs, if the "Max-Ports" setting is reduced from the currently configured value to a value less than the "Used-Ports" value reported for that port profile by VMware vCenter, this is a mis-configuration. The new value for "Max-Ports" for that port profile will only be updated in Cisco UCS Manager and its update in VMware Center will fail, causing a inconsistency between Cisco UCS Manager and VMware Center Server.
Workaround
Symptom When a service profile containing 2 vNICs and having failover enabled is applied to some adapters, the fail back timeout specified in the adapter policy for the second vNIC has no effect. The fail back timeout specified in the adapter policy and applied to the first vNIC is applied to the whole adapter and effective for both vNICs.
Workaround
Symptom Cisco UCS Manager reports incorrect v NICs or VIFs associated with a given Virtual Machine if and only if the Virtual Machine is deployed from VMware Center in Fault-Tolerance (Active-Standby) mode and the Virtual Machine happens to be the standby or FT Virtual Machine.
Workaround
Cisco UCS Manager GUI
Symptom The UCSM GUI could show all DIMMs to be in array 1, and maximum memory for a blade of 192GB for a B200.
Workaround
Symptom Hardware revision numbers for fabric interconnect components are not populated in the Cisco UCS Manager.
Workaround
Symptom In the Cisco UCS Manager GUI, you can only select port channels and individual uplink ports as pin targets, but the Cisco UCS Manager CLI allows you to also select port channel member ports as pin targets.
Workaround
Symptom Even though there are no POST failures in the chassis, Cisco UCS Manager may sometimes display the overall status of the chassis as POST-failure.
Workaround
Symptom Statistics counters cannot be cleared using Cisco UCS Manager CLI.
Workaround
Symptom The assignment of servers to dynamic pools do not automatically occur.
Workaround
Symptom In Cisco UCS Manager GUI, if the Reboot on boot Order Change checkbox is checked for a boot policy, and if CD-ROM or Floppy is the last device in the boot order, then deleting or adding the device does not directly affect the boot order and the server does not reboot.
Workaround
Symptom When a cluster configuration is set up such that I/O module 1 goes to fabric interconnect B and I/O module 2 goes to fabric interconnect A, then the Ethernet devices are given ports 1 and 0. However if the setup is straight, with I/O Module 1 connected to fabric interconnect A and I/O Module 2 to fabric interconnect B, then the devices are assigned ports 0 and 1.
Workaround
Symptom When checking for UUID uniqueness, currently only the UUID suffix is checked.
Workaround
Symptom System takes several minutes to initialize when a large number of virtual interfaces is configured. When a system with a large number of virtual interfaces is rebooted, it can take several minutes to initialize and complete configuration of the virtual interfaces
Workaround
Symptom In a Cisco UCS instance with five or more chassis, the following sequence of events may cause the system to not be in high availability ready state for a period of up to five minutes:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Workaround
Symptom Logon access is denied for user accounts where the password field was left blank during user account creation.
Workaround
Symptom When a fabric interconnect moves from standalone mode to cluster mode the virtual IP Address may be overwritten by the out of band IP of the primary fabric-interconnect. This issue happens only if the out of band IP was modified in stand alone mode before changing the mode to cluster.
Workaround
Symptom When more than 10 Cisco UCS Manager GUI sessions are open at the same time with remote authentication for a long time (typically for a few hours), one of the Cisco UCS Manager GUI sessions may fail to re-authenticate. This causes the session that fails the re-authentication to close. The problem does not happen when local authentication is in use.
Workaround
Fabric Interconnect
Symptom Without pin group configuration, server interfaces are pinned to uplink interfaces of the fabric interconnect dynamically and the pinning is redistributed as uplink interfaces go up or down. In some situations, the distribution of server interfaces across uplink interfaces is not balanced. Potential impact is some uplinks are under utilized.
Workaround
Symptom At bootup of the fabric interconnect, the following message will be displayed on the console: "The startup-config won't be used until the next reboot."
Workaround
Symptom Console login is treating the admin and ADMIN account as the same. Console login name on the fabric interconnect is not case sensitive, so there is no differentiation between e.g. 'admin' and 'ADMIN'.
Workaround
Symptom When you set a TFTP core exporter IP address through Cisco UCS Manager, the fabric interconnect accepts the address even if it is malformed, e.g 1.2.3.412. This does not pose any functional impact to core exporter with valid IP addresses.
Workaround
Symptom Under high stress on the system with repeated port flapping and a default or native VLAN changing simultaneously, a process may cause the fabric interconnect to reload.
Workaround
Symptom The show cdp neighbor command does not display information for CDP neighbors seen from the management interface, nor does it display the fabric interconnect CDP information corresponding to the management interface.
Workaround
Symptom Under some circumstances, system messages are not shown on the terminal monitor even though logging on terminal monitor is enabled globally and on a particular session.
Workaround
Symptom With FM/DM version 5.0(0.295) and UCS 1.1 release, a security user defined in Cisco UCS Manager does not get displayed on FM/DM.
Workaround
UCS Manager CLI
Symptom The UUID of the VM changes in VMware vCenter. After a VM restarts, the virtual machine node on the VM tab shows multiple instances of the same VM with one online and one offline.
Workaround
Symptom If multiple vHBA initiators are configured in the same zone so that they are visible to each other and can login to each other, and storage multipathing is not configured with active and standby paths through the Cisco UCS fabric interconnects (There is only one path through the primary fabric interconnect), and the primary fabric interconnect is rebooted, the vHBA driver can be exposed to a situation in which two initiators can try to login to each other at the same time, and cause a host crash.
Workaround
Symptom ESX Read and Write commands sent on a vHBA keep timing out and being aborted even if the target device is logged into the network. This can happen if the link flaps very fast from up to down to up and memory allocation for the link event fails. The vHBA driver misses the link down event and it does not re-login to the fabric interconnect. The fabric interconnect, however, has no login state for the vHBA and so drops all packets from the vHBA.
Workaround
Release 1.0(2)
The following caveats were opened in UCS software release 1.0(2) and are still unresolved.
Adapters
Symptom If default adapter policies are used, windows OS can take a long time to boot due to non-ideal VHBA related settings.
Workaround
BIOS
Symptom With various Local Disk Configurations, the LSI SAS Configuration Utility fails to launch while in BIOS.
Workaround
Symptom Disabling USB 2.0 is disabled through Advanced->USB, results in various artifacts on that particular page. Some devices may not show up as expected. This results in no functional degredation during POST.
Workaround
Symptom When the memory mirroring configuration is destroyed by removing a DIMM, the BIOS will switch to the Performance mode, and will not log a message that mirroring was disabled.
Workaround
Symptom When plugging or removing USB devices at BIOS Setup -> Advanced -> USB, the Setup Utility may hang.
Workaround
Fabric Interconnect
Symptom When a fabric interconnect moves from standalone mode to cluster mode it is possible that the virtual IP gets overwritten by the out of band IP of the primary fabric-interconnect. This issue happens only if the OOB IP was modified in stand-alone mode before changing the mode to cluster.
Workaround
HTTP
Symptom HTTPD process crashed, with the following event log:
Process crashed. Core file 1253640662_SAM_ucs-6120-1-A_httpd_log.3114.tar.gz (SAM/Switch Core Dump) detected on fabric interconnect A
Workaround
Pinning
UCS Manager GUI
Symptom When more than 10 GUI sessions are open at the same time with remote authentication for a long time (typically for few hours), it has been observed that one of the GUI sessions fails to re-authenticate. This causes the session that fails re-authentication to close. Problem does not happen when local authentication is in use.
Workaround
Symptom When waking up from sleep, the UCS Manager GUI will detect an event sequencing error and display the error: "Event Sequencing is skewed" because the JRE doesn't have a sleep detection mechanism.
Workaround
UUID
Symptom When checking for UUID uniqueness, currently only the UUID suffix is checked.
Workaround
Symptom Downloads may be slow if TFTP is used.
Workaround
Release 1.0(1)
The following caveats were opened in UCS software release 1.0(1e) and are still present.
AAA
Symptom Local user passwords can not contain "$" character.
Workaround Do not include the "$" character in local user passwords. (CSCsz44814)
Symptom When using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of an LDAP provider, the FQDN is not resolved with DNS, and user authentication using the LDAP provider does not work.
Workaround Use an IP address instead of an FQDN when creating LDAP providers. (CSCta09972)
Symptom The IPMI user database in not backed up in the UCS Manager when you export a configuration backup.
Workaround After the configuration import is done, manually configure the IPMI user profile. (CSCta48483)
Adapters
Symptom With fabric failover being enabled in a service profile associated with a QLogic or Emulex CNA, there is a potential traffic loss in the network-to-host direction if the fabric interconnect is operating in End Host mode. The duration of loss depends on how soon after failover the host sends a packet towards the network.
Workaround The traffic loss ends as soon as the host sends a packet after the failover. If the host is a silent host, inject traffic from the host towards the network. (CSCsw39341)
Symptom When a service profile containing two vNICs and having failover enabled is applied to QLogic or Emulex CNAs, the failback timeout specified in the adapter policy for the second vNIC has no effect. The failback timeout specified in the adapter policy and applied to the first vNIC is applied to the whole adapter and is effective for both vNICs.
Workaround Specify the desired failback timeout in the adapter policy and apply to the first vNIC. (CSCsz68887)
Symptom When a DCBXP peer on a physical interface sends two different unique identifiers in the protocol data unit in the same session, a DCBXP process error disables the port.
Workaround Enter the following commands and then wait for a minute for the port to come up:
scope chassis chassis-idscope server server-idscope adapter adapter-idscope ext-eth-if ext-eth-if-idset adminstate reset-connectivitycommit-buffer(CSCsx42435)
BIOS
Symptom When a blade server is powered on with a faulty DIMM, the BIOS POST detects the faulty DIMM and two SEL entries are sent to the BMC. One entry is logged for each DIMM.
Workaround Enter the BIOS setup and navigate to the Advanced > Memory Configuration menu to distinguish the faulty DIMM from its neighbor. (CSCsy97698)
Symptom Installing EFI Native SLES 11 is currently not supported in this release.
Workaround None. (CSCsz99666)
Symptom One vNIC defined in the UCS Manager service profile boot order results in two BIOS vNICs.
Workaround Avoid defining two different pxelinux.cfg/<MAC> files that have different boot/install instructions. When booted, both vNICs should execute the same PXE configuration. (CSCsz41107)
Fabric Interconnect
Symptom Without pin-group configuration, server interfaces are dynamically pinned to fabric interconnect uplink interfaces, and the pinning is redistributed as uplink interfaces go up or down. In some situations, the distribution of server interfaces across uplink interfaces is not even.
Workaround None. (CSCsv92356)
Symptom When a fabric interconnect boots, the "The startup-config won't be used until the next reboot" message appears on the console. Fabric interconnect configuration is controlled by the UCS Manager, so this message has no meaning on the fabric interconnect configuration and has no functional impact.
Workaround None. (CSCsx13134)
Symptom Console logon user names on the fabric interconnect are not case sensitive. For example, there is no differentiation between admin and ADMIN.
Workaround Use case insensitive user names. (CSCsy15489)
Symptom When you set TFTP core exporter IP address through the UCS Manager, the fabric interconnect accepts the address even if it is malformed; for example, 1.2.3.412. This has no functional impact to core exporter with valid IP addresses.
Workaround Remove the malformed core exporter IP address. (CSCsz75747)
Symptom When the system is under high stress, with repeated port flapping (ports rapidly going up and down) and default (native) VLAN change, the FWM process may core and cause the fabric interconnect to reload.
Workaround None. (CSCta09325)
Symptom The show cdp neighbor CLI command does not display information for CDP neighbors seen from the management interface, nor does it display the fabric interconnect CDP information corresponding to the management interface.
Workaround None. (CSCta25287)
Symptom Under some circumstances, syslog messages are not shown on a terminal monitor even though logging on the terminal monitor is enabled globally and on a particular session.
Workaround Use a different syslog destination, such as console, remote server, or local log file. (CSCta31689)
Faults and Alerts
Symptom Even though there are no POST failures in the chassis, the UCS Manager sometimes displays the overall status of the chassis as POST-failure.
Workaround Check the chassis POST messages for errors, and if there are none, ignore the UCS Manager status message. (CSCsz01878)
Symptom In rare cases the UCS Manager reports the link absence fault between the fabric interconnect server port and the fabric extender during the internal inventory collection. The following is an example of such a fault:
***************************Severity: ClearedCode: F0367Last Transition Time: 2009-07-15T11:47:49ID: 646445Status: NoneDescription: No link between fabric extender port 2/1/1 and switch A:1/9Affected Object: sys/chassis-2/slot-1/fabric/port-1Name: Ether Switch Intfio Satellite Connection Absent Cause: Satellite Connection AbsentType: ConnectivityAcknowledged: NoOccurences: 1Creation Time: 2009-07-15T11:46:49Original Severity: MajorPrevious Severity: MajorHighest Severity: Major*******************************Workaround Ignore the fault message; it will automatically get cleared after one minute. This will not impact the data path. (CSCta76573)
High Availability
Symptom On a system with five or more chassis, the following sequence of events causes the system to not be HA ready for up to five minutes:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Workaround Wait for HA READY. (CSCsz40462)
Symptom After a full restore of the primary fabric interconnect, the subordinate fabric interconnect installation may temporarily fail with the following message:
Enter the admin password of the peer switch:Connecting to peer switch... unable to connect! Password could be wrong.Hit enter to try again or type 'restart' to start setup from beginning...Workaround Retry the fabric interconnect installation. (CSCsz85876)
Inventory
Symptom Hardware revision numbers for fabric interconnect components are not populated in the UCS Manager.
Workaround Perform the following steps to determine the revision number for a fabric interconnect component:
1.
2.
Symptom All DIMMs are reported to be in array 1, and maximum memory for a blade is reported as 192 GB.
Workaround DIMMs may be physically located in array 1 or array 2, and the maximum memory is 96 GB. This is a display-only issue, and does not affect functionality. (CSCta56527)
Pinning
Symptom In the UCS Manager GUI, you can only select port channels and individual uplink ports as pin targets, but the UCS Manager CLI allows you to also select port channel member ports as pin targets.
Workaround Port channel member ports should not be selected as pin targets, even if the UCS Manager CLI allows you to. (CSCta60495)
Pools and Policies
Symptom The assignment of servers to pools in a dynamic pool are not dynamically assigned. To have a server assigned to a pool, it must be re-acknowledged. This should happen automatically based on the server pool policy qualifications as soon as the qualification is associated to a pool.
Workaround Re-acknowledge the server to enable it as a candidate for pool assignment. (CSCta06882)
Server
Symptom Local disk removal and insertion is not detected.
Workaround Select the Re-Acknowledge Server option in UCS Manager GUI to discover the server. (CSCsy80888)
Symptom The disk scrub policy needs enhancements to meet DOD compliance.
Workaround None. (CSCsy20036)
SNMP
Symptom SNMP shows the fabric inteconnect name rather than system name.
Workaround None. (CSCta22029)
Symptom An SNMP user name can not be the same as a local user name.
Workaround Select an SNMP user name that does not match any local user name. (CSCta24034)
SMASH
Symptom Any SMASH command entered with wrong option should give "INVALID OPTION" error message.
Workaround None. (CSCsv87256)
UCS Manager CLI
Symptom Statistics counters cannot be cleared using the UCS Manager CLI.
Workaround Clear the counters using the UCS Manager GUI. (CSCsz47512)
UCS Manager GUI
Symptom When several KVM Consoles are launched, the SUN JRE sometimes reports an error and the KVM Console fails to launch.
Workaround Launch the KVM Console again. (CSCta38463)
Symptom In the UCS Manager GUI, if the Reboot on boot Order Change checkbox is checked for a boot policy, and if CD-ROM or Floppy is the last device in the boot order, then deleting or adding the device does not directly affect the boot order and the server does not reboot.
Workaround None. (CSCta54895)
Symptom Fibre Channel port and server port events do not appear on the Fibre Channel port and server port Events tabs.
Workaround Look on the Admin Events tab for Fibre Channel port and server port events. (CSCta66375)
UUID
Symptom When the time-based UUID generation method is used in the uuidgen tool, the system reports duplicate UUIDs because UUIDs are validated based on their suffix, whereas time-stamp method creates UUIDs with unique prefixes, but non-unique suffixes.
Workaround Use the random method in the uuidgen tool to ensure that suffixes are unique. (CSCta40790)
New Hardware Features in Release 1.2(1)
This release adds support for the:
•
•
•
•
UCS instances in this release scale to up to 10 UCS 5108 chassis.
Related Documentation
For related documentation, refer to this document:
•
Hardware Documents
•
•
•
•
Software Documents
There were no functional changes to the user interface in this release. Configuration guides for Release 1.1(1) can and should be used.
•
•
•
•
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html
Subscribe to the What's New in Cisco Product Documentation as an RSS feed and set content to be delivered directly to your desktop using a reader application. The RSS feeds are a free service. Cisco currently supports RSS Version 2.0.
This document is to be used in conjunction with the documents listed in the "Related Documentation" section.
Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1005R)
Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.
© 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
FeedbackContact Cisco
- Open a Support Case
- (Requires a Cisco Service Contract)