Chassis Management

Chassis Management in Cisco UCS Manager GUI

You can manage and monitor all chassis in a Cisco UCS domain through Cisco UCS Manager GUI.

Cisco UCS X9508 Series Chassis

The Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System begins with the Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis. With a midplane-free design, I/O connectivity for the X9508 chassis is accomplished with frontloading, vertically oriented compute nodes intersecting with horizontally oriented I/O connectivity modules in the rear of the chassis. A unified Ethernet fabric is supplied with the Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules.

The system is primed with Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules that provide a robust Ethernet fabric and is set to accommodate emerging protocols with the innovative Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology, ensuring easy upgrades with new modules as they become available.

The major feature of the chasssi include:

  • 7-Rack-Unit (7RU) chassis has 8x front-facing flexible slots. These can house a combination of compute nodes and a pool of future I/O resources that may include GPU accelerators, disk storage, and nonvolatile memory.

  • 2x Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules (IFMs) at the top of the chassis that connect the chassis to upstream Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects. Each IFM features.

    • Up to 100 Gbps of unified fabric connectivity per compute node

    • 8x 25-Gbps SFP28 uplink ports. The unified fabric carries management traffic to the Cisco Intersight cloud-operations platform, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic, and production Ethernet traffic to the fabric interconnects.

  • At the bottom are slots ready to house future I/O modules that can flexibly connect the compute modules with I/O devices. We call this connectivity Cisco UCS X-Fabric technology because “X” is a variable that can evolve with new technology developments.

  • Six 2800W Power Supply Units (PSUs) provide 54V power to the chassis with N, N+1, and N+N redundancy. A higher voltage allows efficient power delivery with less copper and reduced power loss.

  • Efficient, 4x100mm, dual counter-rotating fans deliver industry-leading airflow and power efficiency. Optimized thermal algorithms enable different cooling modes to best support the network environment. Cooling is modular so that future enhancements can potentially handle open- or closed-loop liquid cooling to support even higher-power processors.

This Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis supports Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, Cisco UCS 6536, UCS 6454, UCS 64108 fabric interconnects.

The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, identified as UCSX-S9108-100G, enhances the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System by incorporating a pair of internal Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects S9108 100G. This integration creates a self-contained system that connects up to eight server nodes with unified fabric, IP, and Fibre Channel connectivity, all managed by Cisco UCS Manager. The X-Series Direct is compatible with all components of the X-Series Modular System.

For more information, see Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis Data Sheet.

The Cisco UCS S3260 Chassis

Cisco UCS Manager Release 4.2(3) introduces support for the Cisco UCS S3260 chassis on Cisco UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnect.

Cisco UCS Manager Release 4.1(1) introduces support for the Cisco UCS S3260 chassis on Cisco UCS 64108 Fabric Interconnect.

Cisco UCS Manager Release 4.0(1) introduces support for the Cisco UCS S3260 chassis on Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect.

Cisco UCS Manager Release 3.1(2) introduces support for the Cisco UCS S3260 chassis on Cisco UCS 6300 Series fabric interconnect setups.

The Cisco UCS S3260 chassis is a 4U chassis that is designed to operate in a standalone environment and also as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System. It has the following main components:

  • Four 1050 Watt AC modular power supplies (2 + 2 shared and redundant mode of operation)

  • Two System IO Controller (SIOC) slots

  • Two storage server slots out of which one can be used for storage expansion


    Note

    The second server slot in the chassis can be utilized by an HDD expansion tray module for an additional four 3.5” drives.

  • 56 3.5” drive bays with an optional 4 x 3.5” HDD expansion tray module instead of the second server

  • Up to 360 TB storage capacity by using 6 TB HDDs

  • Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expanders that can be configured to assign the 3.5” drives to individual server modules

  • The two servers in the chassis can be replaced by a single, dual-height server with an IO expander

Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis

The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is logically part of the fabric interconnects, thus creating a single, coherent management domain and decreasing management complexity. In the management domain, server management is handled by the fabric interconnect, while I/O and network management is extended to every chassis and blade server. Basing the I/O infrastructure on a unified fabric allows the Cisco Unified Computing System to have a simple and streamlined chassis yet offer a comprehensive set of I/O options. This results in the chassis having only five basic components:

  • The physical chassis with passive midplane and active environmental monitoring circuitry

  • Four power-supply bays with power entry in the rear, and redundant-capable, hot-swappable power supply units accessible from the front panel

  • Eight hot-swappable fan trays, each with two fans

  • Two fabric extender slots accessible from the back panel

  • Eight blade server slots accessible from the front panel

The blade server chassis has flexible partitioning with removable dividers to handle two blade server form factors:

  • Half-width blade servers have access to power and two 10GBASE-KR connections, one to each fabric extender slot.

  • Full-width blade servers connect to power and two connections to each fabric extender.

Extended Chassis for UCS Mini

Cisco UCS Manager Release 3.1(1) introduces support for an extended UCS 5108 chassis to an existing single-chassis Cisco UCS 6324 fabric interconnect setup. This extended chassis enables you to configure an additional 8 servers. Unlike the primary chassis, the extended chassis supports IOMs. Currently, it supports UCS-IOM-2204XP and UCS-IOM-2208XP IOMs. The extended chassis can only be connected through the scalability port on the FI-IOM.


Important

Currently, Cisco UCS Manager supports only one extended chassis for UCS Mini.

To use a extended chassis, do the following:

  • Connect the second Cisco UCS 5108 chassis to the existing single-chassis Cisco UCS 6324 Series fabric interconnect configuration through the scalability port.

  • Configure the chassis discovery policy.

  • Configure the server ports and wait for the second chassis to be discovered.

Guidelines for Removing and Decommissioning Chassis

Consider the following guidelines when deciding whether to remove or decommission a chassis using Cisco UCS Manager:

Decommissioning a Chassis

Decommissioning is performed when a chassis is physically present and connected but you want to temporarily remove it from the Cisco UCS Manager configuration. Because it is expected that a decommissioned chassis will be eventually recommissioned, a portion of the chassis' information is retained by Cisco UCS Manager for future use.

Removing a Chassis

Removing is performed when you physically remove a chassis from the system. Once the physical removal of the chassis is completed, the configuration for that chassis can be removed in Cisco UCS Manager.


Note

You cannot remove a chassis from Cisco UCS Manager if it is physically present and connected.

If you need to add a removed chassis back to the configuration, it must be reconnected and then rediscovered. During rediscovery Cisco UCS Manager will assign the chassis a new ID that may be different from ID that it held before.

Acknowledging a Chassis

Acknowledging the chassis ensures that Cisco UCS Manager is aware of the change in the number of links and that traffics flows along all available links.


Note

Chassis acknowledgement causes complete loss of network and storage connectivity to the chassis.

After you enable or disable a port on a fabric interconnect, wait for at least 1 minute before you re-acknowledge the chassis. If you re-acknowledge the chassis too soon, the pinning of server traffic from the chassis might not get updated with the changes to the port that you enabled or disabled.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis that you want to acknowledge.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Acknowledge Chassis.

Step 6

If Cisco UCS Manager displays a confirmation dialog box, click Yes.

Cisco UCS Manager disconnects the chassis and then rebuilds the connections between the chassis and the fabric interconnect or fabric interconnects in the system.

Decommissioning a Chassis

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis that you want to decommission.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Decommission Chassis.

Step 6

If Cisco UCS Manager GUI displays a confirmation dialog box, click Yes.

The decommission may take several minutes to complete. After the chassis has been removed from the configuration, Cisco UCS Manager adds the chassis to the Decommissioned tab.

Removing a Chassis

Before you begin

Physically remove the chassis before performing the following procedure.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis that you want to remove.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Remove Chassis.

Step 6

If Cisco UCS Manager displays a confirmation dialog box, click Yes.

The removal may take several minutes to complete.

Recommissioning a Single Chassis

This procedure returns the chassis to the configuration and applies the chassis discovery policy to the chassis. After this procedure, you can access the chassis and any servers in it.


Note

This procedure is not applicable for Cisco UCSC S3260 Chassis.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment node.

Step 3

Click the Chassis node.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the Decommissioned tab.

Step 5

For the chassis that you want to recommission, do the following:

  1. Right-click the chassis and choose Re-commission Chassis.

  2. In the Chassis ID field of the Re-commission Chassis dialog box, type or use the arrows to choose the ID that you want to assign to the chassis

  3. Click OK.

Step 6

If Cisco UCS Manager GUI displays a confirmation dialog box, click Yes.

This procedure may take several minutes to complete. After the chassis has been recommissioned, Cisco UCS Manager runs the chassis discovery policy and adds the chassis to the list in the Navigation pane.

Recommissioning Multiple Chassis

This procedure returns the chassis to the configuration and applies the chassis discovery policy to the chassis. After this procedure, you can access the chassis and any servers in it.


Note

This procedure is not applicable for Cisco UCSC S3260 Chassis.


Note

You cannot renumber the chassis when you recommission multiple chassis at the same time. Cisco UCS Manager assigns the same ID that the chassis had previously.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment node.

Step 3

Click the Chassis node.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the Decommissioned tab.

Step 5

In the row for each chassis that you want to recommission, check the Re-commission check box.

Step 6

Click Save Changes.

Step 7

If Cisco UCS Manager GUI displays a confirmation dialog box, click Yes.

This procedure may take several minutes to complete. After the chassis has been recommissioned, Cisco UCS Manager runs the chassis discovery policy and adds the chassis to the list in the Navigation pane.

Renumbering a Chassis


Note

You cannot renumber a blade server through Cisco UCS Manager. The ID assigned to a blade server is determined by its physical slot in the chassis. To renumber a blade server, you must physically move the server to a different slot in the chassis.


Note

This procedure is not applicable for Cisco UCSC S3260 Chassis.

Before you begin

If you are swapping IDs between chassis, you must first decommission both chassis, then wait for the chassis decommission FSM to complete before proceeding with the renumbering steps.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Verify that the Chassis node does not include the following:

  • The chassis you want to renumber

  • A chassis with the number you want to use

If either of these chassis are listed in the Chassis node, decommission those chassis. You must wait until the decommission FSM is complete and the chassis are not listed in the Chassis node before continuing. This might take several minutes.

Step 4

Click the Chassis node.

Step 5

In the Work pane, click the Decommissioned tab.

Step 6

For the chassis that you want to renumber, do the following:

  1. Right-click the chassis and choose Re-commission Chassis.

  2. In the Chassis ID field of the Re-commission Chassis dialog box, type or use the arrows to choose the ID that you want to assign to the chassis

  3. Click OK

Step 7

If a confirmation dialog box displays, click Yes.

Turning on the Locator LED for a Chassis

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Click the chassis that you need to locate.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Turn on Locator LED.

This action is not available if the locator LED is already turned on.

The LED on the chassis starts flashing.

Turning off the Locator LED for a Chassis

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis for which you want to turn off the locator LED.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Turn off Locator LED.

This action is not available if the locator LED is already turned off.

The LED on the chassis stops flashing.

Creating a Zoning Policy from Inventory

You can create a disk zoning policy from the existing inventory and disk ownership.


Note

Creating a disk zoning policy from the existing inventory is supported only on Cisco UCS S3260 chassis.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis for which you want to create a zoning policy.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click Create Zoning Policy from Inventory.

Step 6

In the Create Zoning Policy from Inventory dialog box that appears, do the following:

  1. Enter the Disk Zoning Policy Name.

  2. Select the organization where you want to create the policy.

  3. Click OK

Step 7

In the confirmation dialog box that appears, click OK.

Viewing the POST Results for a Chassis

You can view any errors collected during the Power On Self-Test process for all servers and adapters in a chassis.

Procedure

Step 1

In the Navigation pane, click Equipment.

Step 2

Expand Equipment > Chassis.

Step 3

Choose the chassis for which you want to view the POST results.

Step 4

In the Work pane, click the General tab.

Step 5

In the Actions area, click View POST Results.

The POST Results dialog box lists the POST results for each server in the chassis and its adapters.

Step 6

(Optional) Click the link in the Affected Object column to view the properties of that adapter.

Step 7

Click OK to close the POST Results dialog box.