HOW TO BUILD A LAB FOR CCNP/CCIE COLLAB - UCS FAMILIARIZATION AND SETUP PART 1

hello everyone thank you for joining me today for this video I'll be going through a familiarization with the UCS where we talk about some of the hardware that comes with it I'll highlight the importance of checking the spec sheet which I will put the spec sheet for my server down in the comments and also we'll be going through how to upgrade the drivers and different software firmware that are on the UCS itself before doing the upgrade to the software though we're going to talk about how to configure SCIM C which is the management interface for the UCS it's very similar to integrated lights-out if you're familiar with HP servers integrated lights-out I think is also known as ILO so it should be a pretty interesting video and I'll go ahead and jump into it now but if you're new here don't forget to subscribe and like and comment on the video to let me know if there's any other things that you would like to know about the UCS thank you first off you want to figure out what type of server you have here you can see that I have a UCSC 220 m4 and it has the drives that are smaller they're not the thick like 3.5 drives so that makes this a small form-factor server so it's a C 220 M for s FF small form-factor and when you first get the server right you're gonna have to get the drives I have solid-state drives in here you definitely want to have good drives because the new CCIE collaboration is pretty much all virtualized which means that you're really going to need to have the performance aspect taken care of and we'll crack this thing open real quick I know not everybody's going to have a server right but I do know that there are people out there that get servers off Craigslist eBay or even just on Facebook or wherever so if you get your hands on a server you'll want to make sure that you have fans for it you want to make sure that you read the spec sheet and understand how to populate the DIMM slots you want to make sure that your heat sinks are on here and that you have CPU that is supported by your UCS and you'll want to get probably a RAID controller to be able to control all your drives and I only have one power supply but you'll want to make sure that your power supply actually is the proper power supply for your server and ideally we would have two power supplies but again I'm doing this video for people that are making lab environments and in here you can see these SD cards which are cisco flex flash I just put these in there's nothing on them and you'll want to make sure that your server that you have the right ones for your server this server here you have to have at least a 32 gig SD card and later on later on in the video what I'm going to do is make those my boot device where I actually install ESXi on that that way I can make use of all eight of my drives here I don't have to have any of them working as my boot drive and you can make a raid out of these SD cards which give you some redundancy and room for failover let's go ahead and move to the back of the server first I'm going to go ahead and put this cover back on whenever you're doing anything with the server nothing should have to be forced really like this I just closed that so easily you don't want to have to force things if you're having to force it it's probably not seated correctly and I say that for the CPU the memory the drives the cover anything you're doing make sure that it's easy enough to put in the CPU in the memory at times it might seem like you're forcing it because you do have to put a little bit more force on that but make sure you have the the DIMM actually facing the right way all of that good stuff just you shouldn't have to be putting any sort of muscle into it so here on the back of the server you can see I have my VGA where I plugged in my monitor I've plugged in my keyboard here because when I first fire this up I'm going to need that in order to to see what my IP address is on see IMC if that's already enabled and you can see here there's a NIC with an M on it that's the management interface and then these other ones have a one and A two those are my network interfaces and up here I have a riser card which is PCIe one and I use that to have additional network interfaces if I need them something about this management interface when you set up to have a shared LOM you don't need to plug into that port because these ports will serve as network management and network so an interface and networked interface let's go ahead and power this thing up and take a look at how it works and the server is going to start getting louder as it goes through its tests and then eventually it'll get quiet and it'll get loud and get quiet when I was first dealing with a UCS I was kind of nervous about it because I thought maybe I did something wrong and I wasn't sure why it was powering down so as you can see right there it just got quiet and maybe I did maybe it might do a couple beeps or something but it will power back on here pretty soon and then we should start seeing some things popping up on the screen here too so it just went from configuring and testing memory to configuring platform hardware if the server gets stuck at configuring and testing memory it could be a couple different things it could be that you have a bad slot a bad memory slot on the server it could be a problem with the CPU that you're using and it could even be that the software on the UCS needs to be updated so right here we're going to go and hit f8 to get into the Cisco IMC configuration right there it says you can hit ctrl R to run the RAID controller setup I will do that later on after I get CI MC setup so for the Nick mode I'm going to do shared mom I'm going to skip all of this I have it already set up for ipv4 I have it for DHCP enabled this is all good here and I'll leave this as active active and I'll leave all of that as well I'll hit f1 for the additional settings I want to change the hostname [Music] I'll leave the dynamic DNS the way it is all right so now I'll hit f10 to save so I will go ahead and exit here by hitting escape so right now it's going to try to boot but I've not yet installed ESXi on the server so it's not going to have a boot device and we'll see what that looks like all right so that's what it will look like when you don't have any any operating system installed now what I'll do is power this thing back down again because once it boots up I want to go into setting up the the virtual drive you can see that the sims see IP address is down there at the bottom if you don't know this MC IP address the only way to get it is to plug in a monitor to the UCS and reboot the server so right here we have the option to do f2 f6 f7 f8 and f12 none of those are what I want to do here go my actual physical drives and I want to do ctrl R to get into how to set up a raid here so I'm going to move up to this part here where it says the Cisco 12 gig SAS modular raid and I will hit f2 and then it says you can clear the configuration or do whatever I want to create a virtual drive so I'll hit enter and I'm going to do a rade 50 okay so I went ahead and hit an X and each one of these and you can see that some of them have black X while others have a white X that just is letting us know that we're going to do a four to four mirror so we'll select advanced and see what that's about so I'm going to leave everything untouched really I will do and initialize and that's going to to destroy any data that's on the virtual drive I'm okay with that and we'll say okay so now my initialization is complete we can see here we've got spam zero and span one and off to the right over here you can see that there's a one virtual drive with eight physical drives so let's see I'm going to hit escape and see if this lets me exit I'll hit okay so now I have to reboot the system by hitting ctrl e Alt Delete and now the system is going to boot all the way up and what will happen is it will again reach a point where it says that there is no software installed and that's because again we've not yet installed ESXi so I'll leave this be and you know we'll start working on standing up the UCS by using the C IMC web interface so here I am at the login interface of the Cisco integrated management controller that's what CI MC stands for you can see I'm on version 3.0 for o and I've already logged in so what happens when you haven't logged into sim C when you're about to login for the first time you have to login using the default password which is password and after you've logged in they'll tell you you've logged in using the default password you have to change it I'll go ahead and log in and while that's logging in I want to show you where the host upgrade utility ISO files are located you have to go to the Downloads home and then servers unify computing UCS e-series rack whatever you can see it up here and you want to choose the option for server firmware and I think that it has this here because I've selected that right so yeah it changes this one changes so well go back you can see it here the selected the suggested releases the one with the star next to it and that's due to quality stability and longevity so I'll go ahead and I'll download this file and we have to accept License Agreement and then this will go ahead and download we can see it over here downloading I've got the software downloaded and before I actually go and launch KVM and map the virtual device and all those other things I want to mention that I don't have any other media on the server no operating systems on the server that this server is going to find and boot up so I'm just going to map the virtual drive power on the system and it will find my software and boot it up if you are using a server that you already had your ESXi on or whatever and you're using the host upgrade utility to upgrade your drives and your CI MC and your bios and all the other stuff you would need to go over here and go to compute and go into configure boot order and you know change some things around here maybe add a boot device I've already added a my USB device just playing around with some things and you can select your device for a one-time boot I'm not doing that though don't forget to save your changes anyway let's go back to the home page you can launch KVM and do html-based KVM or java-based KVM 99.9% of the time I use HTML based KVM but for what I'm doing right now I'm going to do these Java based KVM and here I'll have to say keep this let's say continue and remember that I am in a lab environment so I don't care about all these warnings that I'm getting so what we'll do is go to virtual media activate virtual devices that's done so now we'll say map cd/dvd I was going to go with the 4.0 - to hotel I'm actually gonna go with I just because it's a lab environment I don't care about having a stable release I just want to get the latest and greatest so now that's mapped and we'll go to power on the system we've seen the system power on X number of times so what I'll do is I'll increase the playback speed and get us to the point where something interesting actually comes up there's going to be a number of times where we are sitting and waiting for a long duration so in those periods of time I'll also increase the playback speed and get us to a point where there may be something to say or something to note another thing you can do here is you could hit f6 to go into the boot menu and select a boot device from there as well if you didn't do it in CI MC so this looks like a bad thing where it says media test failure check cable blah blah blah whatever I'm okay with that it doesn't matter this is what matters it found my host upgrade utility and this line right here the one that talks about Peter and then and the copyright and everything that lets me know that it's the host upgrade utility so now it's about to move on to having tux the Linux penguin here in a minute that part's not too long but I'm still going to increase the playback to get us to the next point now this part takes a really long time but I do want to talk about it we've got this little ring here that's spinning pretty quickly that is not progress indication that is just simply like hey something's going on the smaller circle on the inside that's moving slower and becoming a circle with time that is our progress indication for this particular part of the process but there's still plenty to go that's not how far along we are in the upgraded process there is a point that's going to come where we have to select what we want to upgrade so there there's this isn't just set it and forget it we have to sit and wait for the prompts that you know say hey these are these are the current firmware options that you have running on these different components these are what we could upgrade it to you know then you go in and you select which ones you want or you can say I want to upgrade them all which I upgrade them all another note that I want to say here is that if you upgrade the bios version you have to upgrade the sims ii version so don't don't put yourself in a hard spot by forgetting to do that it's probably best to just go ahead and upgrade all and get all your drivers and firmware you know patched any of the bugs any of the features any of the increased performance that comes with these upgrades just go ahead and get it done that's my opinion especially if you are in a lab environment just go ahead and do it so now I'll go ahead and increase the playback so now we're at the point of copying firmware and tools this part can actually take a pretty long time as well so I'll increase the playback speed here in just a moment and relatively soon we will be at the part where we select the components that we want to upgrade and then we'll go ahead and kick that off and once that's done we have to reboot the server now here it tells us firmware and tools copy completed this is still going to sit here for a little while it doesn't move on to the next part all that quickly all right so now we're moving on to the next part whether it's actually discovering devices and by that it really means like looking up BIOS and see IMC and all the different components that are available for that are possibly available for upgrades and then it's going to you know get data from all of them next it will then move into actually presenting us with the results and letting us choose which to upgrade all right we have to do the software license agreement I agree and we could go in here and select whatever ones we want to upgrade I'm just going to say update all I'll say yes do you wish to proceed with the firmware update yes so now we've reached the point where everything is done and you can even see down here in the in the execution logs where it's actually marking where it was started and what we've done you can also look up here and see pass pass skipped past this one was skipped because it was the same version of software so now I'll hit exit and it says D which exit information C IMC firmware update was done C IMC will be activated on exit so what say yes all right so now it's saying no signal which leads me to believe that the system went down once I hit yes we should see it start to boot up here again in just a moment hey hey what do you know we've got our upgraded version and it actually looks like it comes with an option to modify the language here on the splash screen alright I'll first log in everything looks the way it should to me let's take a look at the host power it is powered off right now which is where I want it and we'll go ahead and move into installing ESXi on the system

Channel: Patrick Kinane

Views: 3,388

Keywords: cisco, ccie, ccnp, lab, home lab, study, labeveryday, labitup, collab, collaboration, tutorial, how to build a home lab, ucs, c220, huu, cimc, host upgrade utility, Cisco Integrated Management Controller

Id: TmkbVSdDYvs

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020