IMM Day 0: The Order of Operations Server Discovery

Hi everyone, my name is Martin McBride and I'm a customer success specialist.00:11And in this video, we'll go over how to configure port roles for server discovery within an Intersight managed mode domain. In today's session, we'll cover the following topics. We'll start with a brief overview of Intersight and the value that it brings.00:15We'll then go over the different types of port roles that can be configured within a port policy. And then we'll demo how to configure a port policy and define server port roles to be able to discover a UCSX blade chassis. So what is Cisco Intersight?00:31Cisco Intersight is our platform designed to deliver unified, intelligent management for your Cisco UCS compute infrastructure. Whether your operations are housed in data centers, co location facilities or even distributed edge environments, Intersight is built to help you manage at scale.00:49By leveraging policy driven automation, it ensures consistent operations across your entire global footprint. We focus on three core pillars to help you simplify your infrastructure life cycle.01:09And free up your IT resources to focus on driving strategic business value. Starting with simplicity. Intersight provides policy driven management across your global infrastructure, making complex environments easier to govern.01:24It also provides visibility. You gain real time health and performance insights, allowing you to monitor your systems with confidence and efficiency. We help you streamline IT operations by automating complex time consuming tasks such as initial server provisioning, perform.01:40More updates and ongoing life cycle management.02:01Ultimately, Cisco Intersight offers a flexible deployment options and seamless ecosystem integration, you need to keep your infrastructure running smoothly and efficiently. So when you create a port policy, you define the port role for the Fabric Interconnect.02:04Here's a list of the different.02:24Types support roles that can be configured. Be sure to check the documentation for any additional information when you're setting your port roles. Today we'll be focusing on server ports that are used for either C series or standalone servers or B series of blade chassis.02:26That are connected to each fabric interconnect.02:46Before we jump into the demo, let's take a look at our environment and the hardware that we'll be configuring. In our demo, we'll be configuring a pair of 6536 fabric interconnects, where we have FIA and FIB.02:52On FIA, we're gonna configure ports 17 and 18 as server ports. Port 17 will connect to IFM one-one, and port 18 will connect to IFM one-two.03:13We'll also set the same for Fabric Interconnect B for port 17 will connect to IFM two-one and port 18 will connect to IFM two-two. Now let's take a look on how we can configure this within Intersight.03:31We're now logged into Intersight and we'll start by going to system and targets to see what has been currently claimed within our inter site portal. And here we can see we have a inter site managed domain that has been claimed.03:57If we go into this inter site managed domain, we can see that we have FIA and FIB for each of our fabric interconnects that have been claimed within intersight. So from here we can go to operate, and then under Fabric interconnects, we can see that we have each fabric interconnect as.04:16FI A and FIB.04:36We can select FIA to get additional details around our fabric interconnect. We currently see that there's only one port that is currently configured as an ethernet uplink port. We can currently see that port 17 and 18 are not configured.04:38And they're both in the admin downstate.04:58If we compare to another port that does not have a transceiver, we can see that Intersight will tell us that there is currently a transceiver absent from that port. So this tells us that our ports 17 and 18 currently have a transceiver and that they are cabled up.05:04And ready for configuration. From here we'll head over to our policies and we're gonna edit the existing port policy and we'll go to actions and then edit.05:20And here we can see the initial information that was used to create the port, including the the port policy name, additional tags that were configured and a description. And we can see that this policy is being applied to Fabric Interconnect A and Fabric Interconnect B.05:41So this one policy gets applied to each fabric interconnect. In our example, we'll be having matching ports so we can use the same policy to map them to each of the fabric interconnect profiles. For some reason your ports weren't going to match, you could even.06:00Would create a separate port policy, one for FIA and one for FIB respectively. But in this demo since we're using the same ports.06:20We can use a single policy for each fabric interconnect. Here we see the options for unified ports if you wanted to configure ports that would be used for a fiber channel. We'll select next here if you were going to use any type of breakout.06:28Ports you can configure your breakout port options. In this demo, we're not using any breakout ports. And then to the topic of today's session, here's where you can configure the different types of port roles. So here we're going to select port 17.06:49Import 18 and select configure, and then we're gonna change the role from unconfigured to server, Leave the auto negotiation as default, and we're gonna leave the manual chassis server numbering to disabled.07:07If you needed to specify the chassis number, you can toggle on this option to specify the chassis numbering. And we'll select save to save the port role configuration.07:26And then we'll select save one more time to save the policy. So at this point we've made the changes to the policy, but we have not applied the changes to the Fabric Interconnect. We can do that by going to profiles.07:42And we can see that for the domain profile that there is a status that shows not deployed changes. And we can get additional information by going into that domain profile, and we can select a few changes or the changes that will be applied when we deploy this profile.07:57Here we can see that we're changing from unconfigured to a server role port for port 17 and for port 18. So from here we'll go to actions and then select deploy, and this will apply the updated port policy to each fabric interconnect.08:17So go ahead and select deploy, we get a successful message that the deployment has started. And from here we can go to the request page, and we can watch the the progress.08:37To make sure that the deployment of the domain profile succeeds. So this will take a few minutes as the profile gets applied to each fabric interconnect. Here we can see that our deployed domain profile.08:56Has completed successfully. We've also successfully completed the chassis inventory, and now we're in the process of going through our blade discovery for the blades that are inserted into the UCSX blade chassis.09:16While the blade discovery continues to run in the background. Let's go ahead and check out our inventory by going to operate and then chassis. And now we can see that we've successfully discovered a UCSX chassis.09:36We can select our chassis, and we can see that it is now beginning to populate the blades that it's going through the blade discovery process. We can also go into inventory to see additional information on the devices that are plugged into the chassis.09:50Including the intelligent fabric modules, which is what's being used to connect from the chassis up to the fabric interconnects that we configured for the ports for the server rules. We go to the topology.10:11We can also see a visual of how everything is wired up.10:31So here we can see that ports 17 and port 18 are connected to IFM ports one/one and one/two for Fabric Interconnect A.10:36And the same for fabric interconnect B port 17 and 18 are cabled up as our server ports to IFM, two/one, and IFM two/two.10:52I think that concludes our demo or we saw how we can configure server ports to be able to discover a UCX blade chassis. Thanks for watching and hope to see you on the next video.11:09