Release Notes for Cisco UCS C-Series Software, Release 1.4(3z)

Overview of the Servers

Cisco® UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers extend unified computing innovations to an industry-standard form factor to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. Designed to operate both in standalone environments and as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System™1, the series employs Cisco technology to help customers handle the most challenging workloads. The series incorporates a standards-based unified network fabric, Cisco VN-Link virtualization support, and Cisco Extended Memory Technology. It supports an incremental deployment model and protects customer investments with a future migration path to unified computing.

The Cisco UCS C250 Extended-Memory Rack-Mount Server is a two-socket, two-rack-unit (2RU) rack-mount server featuring patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology. It is designed to increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads. It also can reduce the cost of smaller memory footprints. This server is built for virtualized workloads in enterprise data centers, service provider environments, and virtual desktop hosting. The system also helps increase performance for large-data-set workloads, including database management systems and modeling and simulation applications. Applications that are memory bound today will benefit by the 384 GB of addressable memory that the Cisco UCS C250 server offers.

The Cisco UCS C210 General-Purpose Rack-Mount Server is a general-purpose, two-socket, two-rack-unit (2RU) rack-mount server housing up to 16 internal small form-factor (SFF) SAS or SATA disk drives for a total of up to 32 terabytes (TB) of storage. The Cisco UCS C210 server is designed to balance performance, density, and efficiency for workloads requiring economical, high-capacity, reliable, internal storage. Based on quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5500 or 5600 series processors, the server is built for applications including virtualization, network file servers and appliances, storage servers, database servers, and content-delivery servers.

The Cisco UCS C200 High-Density Rack-Mount Server is a high-density server with balanced compute performance and I/O flexibility. This price-to-performance optimized two-socket, one-rack-unit (1RU) rack-mount server is designed to balance simplicity, performance, and density for web infrastructure and mainstream data center, small-office, and remote-office applications. Its single-rack-unit size makes it useful for service providers offering dedicated or multi-tenant hosting, and its economical price makes it well suited to the appliance market.

C-series servers are capable of standalone management using Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC), which is an integration of the service processor hardware and the CIMC firmware. CIMC has a Web GUI and a CLI mode.

The Cisco UCS C200 M2 Small Form Factor (SFF) server is a factory-configurable option that is an alternate to the existing Cisco UCS C200 M2 Large Form Factor (LFF) server.

The LFF version of the server can contain up to four 3.5-inch LFF hard drives or solid state drives. If a customer orders the new SFF version of the server, the chassis is configured with a drive backplane and front drive bays that can contain up to eight 2.5-inch SFF drives. The drive bays and backplane are factory-configurable, but are not supported as field-configurable.

The SFF server also allows configurable selection of front-panel control modules. Customers can choose the standard control panel module or an optional DVD-drive module. These two modules are field-replaceable and interchangeable with the supplied cables.

In addition, 2.5-inch drives have been qualified as configurable options for the SFF server. The RAID controller options have also been qualified for the SFF server (LSI MegaRAID 9280-4i4e and LSI 1068-based mezzanine card).

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 your release located at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10477/prod_technical_reference_list.html

Transceivers Specifications

The Cisco UCS C-Series servers supports a wide variety of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity options using Cisco 10GBASE SFP+ modules.

Table 2 and Table 3 details the controllers and the supported transceivers.

Firmware Files

The C-Series software release 1.4(3z) includes the following firmware files:

Note Always upgrade both the BIOS and the CIMC from the HUU ISO. Do not upgrade individual components (only BIOS or only CIMC), since this could lead to unexpected behavior.

Host Upgrade Utility

The Cisco Host Upgrade Utility (HUU) is a tool that upgrades the following firmware:

• Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC)
• System BIOS
• LAN on motherboard (LOM)
• RAID Controllers (LSI storage controllers)
• Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card (VIC)
• Broadcom PCIe adapters

– 5709 Dual and Quad port adapters

– 57711 Dual port adapter

– 57712 Dual port adapter

In addition, this utility now supports the following options:

• Download ISO images for a selected platform on a Windows operating system.
• Recover a corrupt BIOS in the EFI shell.

The image file for the firmware is embedded in the ISO. The utility displays a menu that allows you to choose which firmware components to upgrade. For more information on this utility see:

Cisco Host Upgrade Utility Release 1.4(3) Quick Start Guide

Starting with this 1.4 release, separate ISO images of Host Upgrade Utility are available for different server platforms.

The ISO image is now named as ucs-<server_platform>-huu-<version_number>.iso.

The Cisco Host Upgrade Utility contains the following files:

Note The introduction of the new firmware for UCS P81E resolves the problem of Microsoft Windows 2008 bare metal hosts losing all network configuration information and recording a numbering shift in the NICs after an upgrade. This problem occurs only after upgrading the UCS P81E firmware to 2.0(2h). Upgrading the firmware of the UCS P81E VIC to 2.0(2i) retains the pre-upgrade NIC configuration.

System Requirements

The management client must meet or exceed the following minimum system requirements:

• Sun JRE 1.7.0_45 or earlier (Till 1.6.0_14)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or higher
• Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple Mac OS X v10.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 or higher operating systems

Updating the Firmware

Use the Host Upgrade Utility to upgrade the C-Series firmware. Host Upgrade Utility can upgrade the following software components:

• BIOS
• CIMC
• LAN on Motherboard Settings
• RAID Controller Firmware
• Select PCIe adapter Firmware

All firmware should be upgraded together to ensure proper operation of your server.

Supported Features

Supported Operating Systems in Release 1.4(3z)

Support to the following Operating Systems were added for this release:

• VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 3
• VMware ESXi 5.1 Update 3
• VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 2
• VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3
• VMware ESXi 6.0
• VMware ESXi 6.0 Update 1
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Versions 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Versions 7.0 and 7.1

Supported Platforms

The following platforms are supported in release 1.4(3z):

• UCS-C200 M1
• UCS-C200 M2
• UCS-C210 M1
• UCS-C210 M2
• UCS-C250 M2
• UCS-C250 M2

SNMP

The supported MIB definition for release 1.4(3) can be found at the following link: ftp://ftp.cisco.com/pub/mibs/supportlists/ucs/ucs-C-supportlist.html

Note The above link is incompatible with IE 9.0.

Supported Storage Controllers

SNMP supports the following storage controllers:

• 9260-4i
• 9260-8i
• 9261-8i
• 9280-4i4e

BIOS and Hardware

Symptom Cisco is introducing a new generation of SATA 2.5-inch hard drives which are for the first time compatible with the new SATA Revision 3.0 standard capable of 6 Gbit/s. In particular these hard drives are SATA 500 GB (A03-D500GC3) and 1 TB (A03-D1TBSATA). Due to legacy design constraints in certain Generation M2 C-Series servers, the faster 6 Gbit/s link speeds may not always be possible in all servers. However, in those cases, the link speeds will properly negotiate the link back to the Revision 2.0 standard capability of 3 Gbit/s. This operation is seamless to the user.

Workaround This is a known behavior, as follows:

• The UCS C200 M2 SFF server supports these drives at full 6Gbit/s speeds.
• The UCS C210 M2 server guarantees support of these drives at a minimum of 3Gbit/s speeds.
• The UCS C250 M2 server guarantees support of these drives at a minimum of 3Gbit/s speeds.

Note In some cases, you may find that some or all links have negotiated to the higher 6Gbit/s speeds. Those links that do, will operate properly at that speed.

Upgrading BIOS and CIMC firmware

Caution When you upgrade the BIOS firmware, you must also upgrade the CIMC firmware from the same HUU ISO, or the server may not boot. Do not power off the server until the BIOS and CIMC firmware are updated.

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Cisco provides the Cisco Host Upgrade Utility to assist you in upgrading the BIOS, CIMC, LOM, LSI storage controller, and Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card firmware to compatible levels.

The correct and compatible firmware levels for your server model are embedded in the utility ISO.

To use this utility, start with the Cisco Host Upgrade Utility User Guide, which includes the instructions for downloading and using the utility ISO. Select the correct guide for your desired firmware version from this URL:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10493/products_user_guide_list.html

• Cisco Host Upgrade Utility User Guide for Release 1.2(x)
• Cisco Host Upgrade Utility User Guide for Release 1.3(x)
• Cisco Host Upgrade Utility User Guide for Release 1.4(x)

Release 1.4(3y)

The following caveats were resolved in 1.4(3y) release:

CIMC

Symptom The recursive group search with LDAP fails on CIMC and the user is timed out at the login page. (CSCut27618)

BIOS

Symptom The system may fail due to SMBUS traffic collisions (such as false thermal alarms and so on) on the SMBUS shared by the host and BMC.

Workaround No workaround.(CSCuv62987)

 

This document is to be used in conjunction with the documents listed in the “Related Documentation” section.

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Release Notes for Cisco UCS C-Series Software, Release 1.4(3z)
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