Release Notes for Cisco UCS C-Series Software, Release 2.0(8)
Overview of Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Servers
Overview of Cisco UCS C220 M3 and C240 M3 Rack Servers
Overview of Cisco UCS C22 M3 and C24 M3 Rack Servers
Overview of Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Servers
Overview of Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Servers
Overview of Cisco UCS C220 M4 Rack Servers
Overview of the Pre-Installed Cisco Flexible Flash Card
Hardware and Software Interoperability
Best Practices to Configure Cisco UCS 3X60 RAID Controllers
Upgrading BIOS and Cisco IMC Firmware
Best Practices to Install VMWare
Supported Features in Release 2.0(8)
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
First Published Date: September 4, 2015
Revised Date: February 3, 2016
This document describes the new features, system requirements, open caveats and known behaviors for C- series software release 2.0(8) including Cisco Integrated Management Controller software and any related BIOS, firmware, or drivers. 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 refer to the documentation on Cisco.com for any updates.
Table 1 shows the online change history for this document.
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This section includes the following sections:
The Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server is a modular, high-density server ideal for service providers, enterprises, and industry-specific environments. The Cisco UCS C3160 addresses the need for highly scalable computing with high-capacity local storage. Designed for a new class of cloud-scale applications, it is simple to deploy and excellent for unstructured data repositories, media streaming, and content distribution.
Extending the capability of the Cisco UCS portfolio, the new Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server is an advanced, modular rack server with extremely high storage density. Based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 series, it offers up to 360 TB of local storage in a compact 4-rack-unit (4RU) form factor.
Because all its hard-disk drives are individually hot-swappable, and with its built-in enterprise-class Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) redundancy, the Cisco UCS C3160 helps you achieve the highest levels of data availability.
Unlike typical high-density rack servers that require extended depth racks, the Cisco UCS C3160 has no such requirement and can comfortably fit in a standard-depth rack, such as the Cisco UCS R42610.
The Cisco UCS C3160 uses a modular server architecture which, taking advantage of our blade technology expertise, allows you to upgrade the compute or network nodes in the system without requiring a data migration from one system to another. It delivers:
The Cisco UCS C3160 is deployed as a standalone server in both bare-metal or virtualized environments. Its modular architecture reduces TCO by allowing you to upgrade individual components over time and as use cases evolve, without having to replace the entire system.
The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is designed for performance and density over a wide range of business workloads, from web serving to distributed databases. The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C220 M3 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 1RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family. In addition, the Cisco UCS C220 M3 server offers up to two Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 product family, 16 DIMM slots, eight disk drives, and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports.
The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration. The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C240 M3 server further extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 2RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family. The Cisco UCS C240 M3 offers up to two Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family, 24 DIMM slots, 24 disk drives, and four 1 Gigabit Ethernet LOM ports.
The Cisco UCS C220 M3 and the Cisco UCS C240 M3 interfaces with Cisco UCS using the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC); 1225. The Cisco UCS VIC is a virtualization-optimized Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 x8 10-Gbps adapter designed for use with Cisco UCS C-Series servers. The VIC is a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter that can support up to 256 (1225) PCIe standards-compliant virtual interfaces, which can be dynamically configured so that both their interface types-network interface card (NIC) or host bus adapter (HBA) and identity (MAC address and worldwide name (WWN))-are established using just-in-time provisioning. In addition, the Cisco UCS VIC can support network interface virtualization and Cisco® Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology.
The Cisco UCS C22 M3 Rack Server is an entry-level UCS server designed for both performance and density over a wide range of business workloads, including enterprise web/file/print server and HPC. The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C22 M3 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 1RU form factor with the addition of the Intel Xeon E5-2400 product family. In addition, the Cisco UCS C22 M3 server offers up to two Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2400 product family processors, 12 DIMM slots, 8 disk drives, and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports.
You can order the server in two different versions, each with one of two different front panel and back plane configurations:
Holds up to eight 2.5-inch hard drives or solid state drives
Holds up to four 3.5-inch hard drives
The Cisco UCS C24 M3 Rack Server is designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration. The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C24 M3 server further extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 2RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor Intel Xeon E5-2400 product family. The Cisco UCS C24 M3 offers up to two Intel® Xeon® E5-2400 processors, 12 DIMM slots, 24 disk drives, and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports.
You can order the server in three different versions, each with one of three different front panel/backplane configurations:
Holds up to twenty-four 2.5-inch hard drives or solid state drives.
Holds up to sixteen 2.5-inch hard drives or solid state drives and enables embedded RAID to be used in the server.
Holds up to twelve 3.5-inch hard drives
The Cisco UCS C22 M3 and the Cisco UCS C24 M3 interfaces with Cisco UCS using the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC); 1225. The Cisco UCS VIC is a virtualization-optimized Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 x8 10-Gbps adapter designed for use with Cisco UCS C-Series servers. The VIC is a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter that can support up to 256 (1225) PCIe standards-compliant virtual interfaces, which can be dynamically configured so that both their interface types-network interface card (NIC) or host bus adapter (HBA) and identity (MAC address and worldwide name (WWN))-are established using just-in-time provisioning. In addition, the Cisco UCS VIC can support network interface virtualization and Cisco® Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology.
The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server provides the performance and reliability to run mission-critical applications and virtualized workloads that require intensive computation processing and very high memory capacity. Applications that are memory-bound (for example, large-scale virtualization, massive database applications, and server consolidation) will benefit from the increased performance and memory footprint of the Cisco UCS C460 M4.
The Cisco UCS C460 M4 is a four-rack-unit (4RU) rack server supporting the Intel® Xeon® E7-4800 v2 and E7-8800 v2 processor families. Product highlights include:
The Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server offers industry-leading performance and advanced reliability well suited for the most demanding enterprise and mission-critical workloads, large-scale virtualization, and database applications. Whether the Cisco UCS C460 M4 is used as a standalone system or in a Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) deployment, customers gain the benefits of the server’s high-capacity memory when very large memory footprints such as the following are required:
The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C240 M4 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 2RU form -factor. Based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 series, it delivers an outstanding combination of performance, flexibility, and efficiency. In addition, the Cisco UCS C240 M4 offers outstanding levels of internal memory and storage expandability with exceptional performance. It delivers:
The Cisco UCS C240 M4 Rack Server with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family is well suited for a wide range of storage and I/O-intensive applications such as:
The Cisco UCS C240 M4 can be deployed as standalone servers or as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System, which unifies computing, networking, management, virtualization, and storage access into a single integrated architecture that enables end-to-end server visibility, management, and control in both bare-metal and virtualized environments. Within a Cisco UCS deployment, the Cisco UCS C240 M4 takes advantage of Cisco’s standards-based unified computing innovations, which significantly reduce customers’ total cost-of-ownership (TCO) and increase business agility.
The enterprise-class Cisco UCS C220 M4 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 1RU form factor. It incorporates the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family, next-generation DDR4 memory, and 12-Gbps SAS throughput, delivering significant performance and efficiency gains. The Cisco UCS C220 M4 rack server delivers outstanding levels of expandability and performance in a compact 1RU package:
The Cisco UCS C220 M4 Rack Server with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family is excellent for a wide range of enterprise workloads, including:
Cisco UCS C220 M4 can be deployed as standalone servers or in an UCS-managed environment. When combined with Cisco UCS, the Cisco UCS C220 M4 brings the power and automation of unified computing to enterprise applications, including SingleConnect technology that drastically reduces switching and cabling requirements. Cisco UCS Manager with service profiles enables rapid deployment and end-to-end server visibility, management, and control in both virtualized and bare-metal environments. The Cisco UCS C220 M4 is the most versatile general-purpose enterprise infrastructure and application server in the industry.
Starting with version 1.5(4), the SD storage device is available to Cisco IMC as a single hypervisor (HV) partition configuration. Prior versions had four virtual USB drives.
Refer to the following documents for more information about these tasks:
– Cisco UCS C220 Server Installation and Service Guide
– Cisco UCS C240 Server Installation and Service Guide
– Cisco UCS C460 M4 Server Installation and Service Guide
– Cisco UCS C220 M4 Server Installation and Service Guide
– Cisco UCS C240 M4 Server Installation and Service Guide
The links to these documents are in the C-Series documentation road map:
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
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.
The C-Series software release 2.0(8) includes the following software files:
For release specific ISO versions, see Cisco UCS C-Series Integrated Management Controller Firmware Files, Release 2.0 |
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ucs-cxxx-utils-linux.2.0.8.iso |
Note Always upgrade the BIOS, the Cisco IMC and CMC from the HUU ISO. Do not upgrade individual components (only BIOS or only Cisco IMC or CMC), since this could lead to unexpected behavior. If you choose to upgrade BIOS, the Cisco IMC and the CMC individually and not from the HUU ISO, make sure to upgrade both Cisco IMC, BIOS and CMC to the same container release. If the BIOS, CMC and the Cisco IMC versions are from different container releases, it could result in unexpected behavior. Cisco recommends that you use the Update All option from the Host Upgrade Utility to update the firmware versions of Cisco IMC, BIOS, CMC and all other server components (VIC, RAID Controllers, PCI devices, and LOM) together.
The Cisco Host Upgrade Utility (HUU) is a tool that upgrades the following firmware:
– Intel Ethernet i350 PCI Server Adapter
– Cisco UCSC RAID SAS 12G SAS Modular Raid Controller
– Cisco RAID controller for UCS C3X60 Storage Servers
– Cisco UCSC RAID SAS 12G SAS Modular Raid Controller for C460
– Cisco 12G Modular SAS Pass-through Controller
– UCS 3x60 12G SAS Pass through Controller
– Cisco UCSC RAID SAS 2008M-8i
– 5709 Dual and Quad port adapters
– 57712 Dual port adapter SFP+
– 57712 Dual port adapter 10GBaseT
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:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10493/products_user_guide_list.html
Starting with 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.
For details of firmware files in Cisco Host Upgrade Utility for individual releases, see Cisco UCS C-Series Integrated Management Controller Firmware Files, Release 2.0
The management client must meet or exceed the following minimum system requirements:
Use the Host Upgrade Utility to upgrade the C-Series firmware. Host Upgrade Utility can upgrade the following software components:
All firmware should be upgraded together to ensure proper operation of your server.
Note Cisco recommends that you use the Update All option from the Host Upgrade Utility to update the firmware versions of Cisco IMC, BIOS and all other server components (VIC, RAID Controllers, PCI devices, and LOM) together.
The Cisco C3X60 RAID controller supports JBOD mode on the drives where the physical drives are in pass-thru mode and the physical drive is directly exposed to the OS. We recommended you use JBOD mode instead of individual RAID0 volumes when possible.
The Cisco C3X60 allows you to create of large RAID5/RAID6 volume by including all the drives in the system with a spanned array configuration (RAID50/RAID60). Where possible, we recommended you to create multiple, smaller RAID 5/6 volumes with fewer drives per RAID array. This provides redundancy and reduces the operations time for initialization, RAID rebuilds and other operations.
The I/O policy applies to reads on a specific virtual drive. It does not affect the read ahead cache. RAID volume can be configured in two types of I/O policies. These are:
Although Cached I/O provides faster processing, it is only useful when the RAID volume has a small number of slower drives. With the C3X60 4TB SAS drives, Cached I/O has not shown any significant advantage over Direct I/O. Instead, Direct I/O has shown better results over Cached I/O in a majority of I/O patterns. We recommended you to use Direct I/O (Default Policy) in all cases and to use Cached I/O cautiously.
Cisco C3X60 RAID Controller conduct different background operations like Consistency Check (CC), Background Initialization (BGI), Rebuild (RBLD), Volume Expansion & Reconstruction (RLM) and Patrol Real (PR).
While these BGOPS are expected to limit their impact to I/O operations, there have been cases of higher impact during some of the operations like Format or similar I/O operations. In these cases, both the I/O operation and the BGOPS may take more time to complete. In such cases, we recommend you to limit where possible concurrent BGOPS and other intensive I/O operations.
BGOPS on large volumes can take an extended period of time to complete, presenting a situation where operations complete and begin with limited time between operations. Since BGOPS are intended to have a very low impact in most I/O operations, the system should function without any issues. If there are any issues that arise while running concurrent BGOPS and I/O operations, we recommend you to stop either activity to let the other complete before reusing and/or schedule the BGOPS at a later time when the I/O operations are low.
Cisco provides the Cisco Host Upgrade Utility to assist you in upgrading the BIOS, Cisco IMC, CMC LOM, LSI storage controller, and Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards firmware to compatible levels.
Note When upgrading the Cisco IMC firmware for the UCS C-series M3 and M4 platforms, ensure that you update using the full image (for example upd-pkg-cXXX-m3-Cisco IMC.full.*.bin).
The correct and compatible firmware levels for your server model are embedded in the utility ISO.
To use this utility, use the Cisco Host Upgrade Utility User Guide which includes the instructions for downloading and using the utility ISO. Select the guide from this URL:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10493/products_user_guide_list.html
Once you start the installer application, find the partition where you want to install VMWare. In the following example the partition is vmhba33:C0:T0:L0.
Step 1 Press Alt+F1 to enter the VMWare recovery console.
Step 2 Create a GUID Partition Table (GPT) on the disk:
/dev/disks # partedUtil mklabel mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 gpt
This section includes the following topics:
The following software features are supported in Release 2.0(8):
The following platforms are supported in Release 2.0(8):
Note Server Config Utility (SCU) supports only the UCS-C460 M4 platform for this release.
The supported MIB definition for Release 2.0(8) and later releases 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.
This section lists the resolved caveats for the following:
This section lists the known behaviors for the following:
On the C240 M4 servers, on rare occasions, the Cisco 12 Gigabyte SAS Modular RAID Controller displays an error when you try deleting a virtual drive. |
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When creating new virtual drives of any RAID type, the write cache policy defaults to 'write through' even with a fully functional BBU or super-capacitor battery. When a BBU is present, the default write cache policy should be 'write back with good BBU'. This happens on the C240 M4 and C220 M4 servers with 12 gigabyte SAS mezzanine RAID controllers. |
In the standalone mode, on the Ciso IMC storage tab of the Web UI, edit the virtual drive to set the write caching policy to 'write back with good BBU'. You can also modify the setting using the LSI command line option rom config utility. |
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The MegaRAID Storage Manager displays consistency check errors on RAID 1 volume in Windows. This happens when you try writing data to the drive 20 to 30 minutes after a consistency check (which appears to be normal). |
This is a known Microsoft limitation. For more information, see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2713398 |
This section lists the open caveats for the following:
For configuration information for this release, please refer to the following:
The following related documentation is available for the Cisco Unified Computing System:
Refer to the release notes for Cisco UCS Manager software and the Cisco UCS C Series Server Integration with Cisco UCS Manager Guide at the following locations:
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see What’s New in Cisco Product Documentation at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html.
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