Configuration

DNS Management

Typically, DNS management is defined at a global or corporate level. Therefore, DNS domain names and DNS servers are good candidates for global policy management. Define them as high in the domain group hierarchy’s operational policies as possible.

Power Management

Policies around power management include two different policies:

  • Global power allocation policy—Determines whether to apply power capping at the chassis level, or manually override the power caps at the individual blade level.

  • Power policy—Chassis-level configuration for: Nonredundant, N+1, or Grid for the physical AC power.

The power policy is a strong candidate for Cisco UCS Central policy definition.

Global power allocation policy is one of the most sensitive policies for environmental and location dependencies. Best practices depend on your environment.

For example:

  • Power budgets, per rack, may vary between different datacenters and locations.

  • Some sites may have implemented power groups to create power caps that span multiple racks, specific to a data center layout.

Your global power allocation policy depends on local constraints. Definition schemes, such as creating broadly-scoped policies to restrict power on a per-rack basis, are the simplest. However, a definition scheme is site-specific and hard to generalize.

Fabric Interconnect Port Configuration

Configure physical device configuration for the fabric interconnect ports through Cisco UCS Central. The configuration types now support:

  • Server

  • Uplink

  • Unified Ports

Cisco UCS Central also supports uplink port-channel creation in addition to defining the role of the specific port.

Note
You cannot use Cisco UCS Central to manage objects that depend on physical ports, including pin groups and port-channels for both Ethernet and Fibre Channel.

Forced Time Sync in Cisco UCS Manager

After you set the time in the NTP server, Cisco UCS Manager may appear to not sync the time immediately.

Set the NTP server in the Admin tab to force Cisco UCS Manager to sync with NTP immediately. Then attempt to set the clock from the CLI with the following sequence:

Note

Set the hour using 24-hour military time. 

scope system
scope services
set clock month day year hour minute second

The following example sets the clock to February 22, 2016 at 13:44:00. 

scope system
scope services
set clock february 22 2016 13 44 00

A message follows, indicating, Clock synchronization successful, with Cisco UCS Manager time reflecting the change. Your next registration attempt should succeed.


Note

A time difference of a few seconds can cause registration to fail. For a successful registration to occur, the Cisco UCS Manager system time cannot be behind the Cisco UCS Central system time.

Service Status in Cisco UCS Central

The following CLI commands show how to check the status of the services running on the Cisco UCS Central server. 

UCSC-A# connect local-mgmt 
UCSC-A (local-mgmt)# show pmon state

Note

Do not reset PMON (services) without consulting Cisco TAC.

HTTPS Certificates in Cisco UCS Central

Many features of the Cisco UCS Central management interface rely on available or imported HTTPS certificates (from each Cisco UCS domain managed by Cisco UCS Central) on the client machine.

The browser uses these certificates to manage Cisco UCS Central for invoking features such as KVM launch, Cisco UCS Manager launch, and to query particular faults or alerts in the Cisco UCS fault summary. If you do not import the certificates properly, or if they have expired, or if certain security settings are enabled, you may encounter errors.