Setup Cisco UCS using CIMC

[Music] hey guys JP here with extreme ie wanted to give you guys a quick demo here well it's not a quick demo but wanted to give you guys a demo of our lab you can see up on your screen right now that that we have sim sea which is Cisco's integrated management controller that we have it up on the on the web browser here we're using Google Chrome on it just because I want the you know wants you to be able to read the screen and whatnot I just kind of have it slim down so that the browser and my favorites in the address and all that kind of extra stuff is out of the screen to make this a little bit bigger the only thing I've done here is upgraded the firmware which I'll kind of guide you through also you the I'll kind of talk over the process with you this is a brand new server that we just took out of the box we just racked and stacked it we just cabled it up and I'm going to walk you through how we're going to set up a brand new lab here for extreme IE we're going to run gene s3 we're going to run ESXi and I wanted to walk you guys through it this will help you I think with a few different things that will help you to build your own lab it'll help you to learn sim see it'll help you to just kind of if you're new to this if you're if you've never really built yourself a really good lab on a BT server before this will be a good guide for you now if you're curious how what you know what the server looks like you can go and you can google the datasheet you can just say you know Cisco UCS C 220 it's a C series m4 so this is a single rack a single u server let me just scroll down here so it's a 1u server come on there we go you can see we have eight drives here I don't want to zoom in too much but you can see we have a power and a reset button right here we have some LED lights and then a console connection here on the back of the server we have a number of different ports now these may be different based on your server so you may not have additional four network cards here I actually have I think installed just to see if it was compatible I do have a card here installed that has four network ports in it but I don't think it's compatible not sure why I haven't looked at it but this the overall generic back of the server so generally speaking you'll have dual power supplies just so you know a word if you're not going to plug both of them and sometimes if you're running this in your bedroom all right if I mean I have mine sitting in sitting in my recording studio in another room that's in in my my rack I have a I have a 22 you rack or 24 you rack something like that and I have I think I have like 10 or 12 of these guys sitting in there and I generally don't use both power supplies because I don't want to have to install the extra the extra electrical I don't want to have that much that much power so I usually just plug in one and if you're running to them and you have to install the server will throw what it calls a critical alarm because they will see that you have to install but you're only running one so you may just want to slide the second power supply out a little bit so that it's not actually connected but you can see you have your VGA connection two USB ports for your mouse and/or keyboard or if you're going to run it into KVM or something and then you have a few network ports and let me just kind of go through what these are these two ports here in fact let me if you scroll down if you're in the same data sheet if you pull this up it'll give you kind of the the description of what they are so you can see here that if you're going to plug let's do with number eight first we'll go backwards if you're going to plug in this box to your network so you're going to run you know a nic team and windows or you know whatever you're going to do in in the case of VMware maybe we want to run you know two separate network cards for the management where we're where we would connect to the vSphere client and then we want to run maybe a separate chunk of NICs for the actual trunk ports to our guest operating systems we would plug these two onboard NICs in do you know a switch in a separate VLAN or something like that and these would be more for our management or just regular IP traffic number six here a lot of people think that this is the sim sea connection you might get confused this is basically just a dedicated management port that you can use to manage the box number seven is where your sim C is so number seven your serial port rj45 connector this is basically like a serial connection to the Box this is like consoling into a router or a switch right you can get to it remotely but this is kind of like your console port what you'll do is you'll plug this into your switch and you can put it on your management VLAN you can put it on you can put it in its own VLAN if you want to you can DHCP which in fact is the default so when you plug this in if you have DHCP running on that particular VLAN configured that you know if you have that plugged into an access port this by default will grab an IP address and that's actually how we have ours configured in my lab everything is DHCP I use do everything through reservations because I'm too lazy to go in and statically set addresses however when you boot the box I'll show you where you have an option to go in and statically configure this so this is basically the back of the box and this is where you're going to going to plug everything in now when you first load up sim see it will tell you in the screen and I'll kind of show you this hopefully we'll be able to reboot the box at least once and show you where those connections are so when you reboot the box it will tell you right on the splash screen what the IP address is and then you can you know obviously leave the data center you can go connect to that if you haven't if you've configured it statically then you know already you don't have to wait right so when you first load up the CMC console you're going to want to log in and the default ID and password is going to be admin password all-over case now even though this is brand-new I have already logged into this box already because I had to upgrade the firmware which again I'll show you the where the options are to do that so I think it was 2.0 was installed before and I upgraded it to 303 a which I think is the recommended version when you want to download that I'll show you that in a minute so the the default admin ID is admin and the default password is password but I had to change this because when you first log in it's going to ask you to change you to a secure password so you know you'll need your special character you'll need your number you'll need etc so you know minimum of eight characters all that kind of fun stuff so once you log in let's give this a second here once you log in it's going to load the main splash screen to the box ok so it's going to give you it's going to give you some main product information also go down in a second but it's going to tell you what the host name is obviously you can at this it'll tell you what the IP address of the box is the MAC address firmware version your current time zone if you want to change the time zone you would just select this link here it will bring up the the menu to change it gives you the product name the serial number gives you all the information about the box is something that you would need if you're going to call tack or something like that you want to put an asset tag in here so that you can track it and whatnot scroll down a little bit it will give you the utilization of the box and a lot of this is self-explanatory right and by the way this is the newer firmware version which again is three data if you've just taken your 220 out of the box then you may not have the same views right unfortunately I didn't record a video of what it looked like before hand it is very different so we have the server utilization here and then we have the status of the box now again if you had both power supplies installed this would not be good this would I think this would be either a moderate or a critical alarm and you would click on that and it would tell you that the power supply is lost power redundancy so you can turn on the locator LED up here so again this would be if the box is sitting in Iraq with 40 other servers and you know the knock engineer says well which one do I want to reboot you can't tell them the C 220 because you have 40 of them you can turn on the locator you can reboot the Box you can run a ping utility you can launch the KVM which will do a little bit later here is where you would power on the box or do any type of host power you know administrative control so if the box is currently on which you can see here the host is powered on so this is where we would we would go to either powered off power cycle it we can do a hard reset or we can shut it down you know just kind of like VMware one of these is a graceful shutdown the other one is a hard power off so you just have to know which one you want to which one you want to select now over here you can see we have the Cisco logo where my mouse pointer is to the left of that we have our menu now if I select this the navigator here that's what I wanted to see what is called toggle navigation right so if I want to want to expand the navigator here I have a couple of different options that I can select I'm not going to go through all of them but I'll go through some of them just to kind of show you the GUI screen so we click on inventory inventory I mean pretty self-explanatory right you can see the menus across we have CPU memory so it kind of lets you know what you have going on so here I can see that I have eight eight threads here's the CPU it's a Xeon processor 1.7 gig so I can see those bits of information right so you know it'll give you you know how many number of cores etc memory same kind of concept what's cool about the memory what I what I can appreciate about this is just like any HP server in fact we were our old lab was running esx/esxi six dot something 6.0 and it was on an HP dl380 right kind of an old box I think it was like a g3 or a g4 or something I think they're after g8 so it wasn't it was a you know an older box but it you know it did its did its job but what's cool about this is that this will tell you the banks of where you got the memory installed I don't remember if the ILO card will do that for the HP server maybe it does it's been a while but what's cool is that this will tell you the banks like any server you have to install the memory in the right banks based on the number of CPUs that you have installed and you can't just install them you know a 1-2-3 and etc you have to install them and make them even if you will if you can so you know it gives you that information power supplies it will tell you what you have in the power supplies it will tell you network adapters kind of tells you everything what's cool as you can see here here's the Broadcom NIC card that I have and it says hey you know this this card is not supported right so just gives you some inventory on the box okay power management this actually I don't have I don't have it set up right now because I haven't run the power characterization so we'll skip that so the compute screen is kind of cool because you have a couple of different options you can enter the BIOS setup if you want to but this will reboot the Box you do have a number of options that you can set in here though right from the GUI so for example I can go in and I can click advanced here and I can say processor configuration and I can start to mess around with some of these different processor options so I can say look you know I want to disable hyper threading or any others out you know maybe I don't want to use all the cores and we scroll over so you can see that I could say look you know I only want to use ten or something like that and then once I'm done if I scroll all the way down to the bottom you can see where we have Saveur we have reset you can restore your defaults you can do most of the different options here I know it's kind of small I have to scroll back and forth again I wanted to make sure you guys have a good you guys can read the screen but you can mess with a lot of these different options here and then you just again you scroll down to the to the bottom and you can click Save another big one that I usually like I was just curious in here what what what were options but another big one that I like is the the boot order right and everybody knows when you're provisioning a server and I were watching network engineers but we still have to know at least how to do basic things on servers especially for setting up virtual labs like I'm doing we want to mess with the boot order right you're you're going to boot off a USB thumb drive or you're going to boot off a desk or whatever you want to be able to modify the boot the boot order so what we can do is we can come down here we can say configure boot order and then we can either do a basic boot order so I can say look you know I want to boot off the cd-rom and then the hard drive or we can create an advanced one though I've already created one for virtual media and what I'm going to do is just expand that to just kind of show you what it looks like so here in the virtual media you can see that the subtype is a KVM mapped DVD so essentially what this is it's kind of a cool option in Sim see what you can do is let's say you download an ISO image right so for example you're talking about the firmware so let me go to cisco.com real quick and we'll go to support and I'll say C 220 and I'll pick m4 and we'll go to the firmware so these are all the things you can download for the for this particular box so we'll go to the UCS server firmware and so this is the ISO image of course if you want to download this you have to have if I if I click download it's going to ask me for my chrome I my credentials I just think I'm already logged in or sort of cache but you'll need your CCO your Cisco login to be able to download this but the point is is that you know you download this ISO image and then of course what do you need to do normally you have to boot it to a CD or you have to burn it to a CD then you boot off it what sympathy allows you to do and I'm not really an IBM fan or a Dell fan or or really anything in HP fan I'm a Cisco guy so you know forgive me all of the other consoles to these boxes mail you two do the same exact thing if they do great I'm just not 100% sure because I'm a UCS guy I'm a Cisco guy that's what I do so anyway so what I can do here is I can map I can say look you know what when I start a KVM session when I launched the KVM session I want to be able to map a DVD to an ISO image sitting on my desktop and I want that to be part of my boot order and in fact I want it to be number one so when I start a KVM session and I connect it to an ISO image I want that to be the very first thing the server looks - essentially to boot right so I'm just going to click close we're not doing anything there all right so you know you have some various different other settings that you can look at I'm not going to go into all of them what's weird about this new version I notice is that the networking tab actually doesn't bring up the networking it's not really a bad thing because if you expand the admin the admin toolbar networking is in here so I'm not really sure why it's there or why it doesn't work it's important to know that this networking screen is actually your cincy networking screen so this isn't for you know the nicks on your box this isn't to configure NIC teaming or anything like that this is actually the sim C network card so if you wanted to change the hostname you know you'll have some default hostname like C 220 and then maybe the serial number of the server you can modify that if you want to and that's exactly what I've done here I just changed it to X ie extreme IE lab number one right if when I get the other you know 11 server's up and running they'll be 1 2 3 all the way through 12 right here's what you would obviously disable DHCP and give it a static address if you didn't already go through and do it in the other screen you can enable it for ipv6 if you wanted to you could give it a VLAN tag so there's a number of different options that you have ntp for example so if you wanted to enable your your server to use ntp you could do that again this is my lab I don't really care network security you can have filtering you can have white listing you know who's allowed to connect to the box etc so you have some some additional options your user management what's interesting here is that you can actually connect this to LDAP so any of you guys if you're if you're if you're expanding your lab at all and you running Active Directory in your lab at all you're using maybe ice or other things in your lab and you have Active Directory on the backend and you have some users or even in production right if you have production users you know admins that you want to be able to control who can and cannot log into the box you can synchronize this with Active Directory you'd give it your domain name you'd give it your base DN you would give it the login credentials to log into Active Directory and then you could do it based on groups right I could say hey server admins these guys are allowed to log into SEM C right and then they would be able to right we're not going to set it up and just showing you where the option is right so in the older versions if you click you see me keep going back to the navigator here again it's just up here when I click on that it expands this out you can change you know I think you can change some of the views here if you want to and you can have some different different characters a catalyze a shion's if you want to so I'm going to say firmware management now in the older versions you can see here it says backup version 2.0 in version 2 Dell it gave you options to actually upgrade the firmware and the BIOS based on a file you download so in other words if I if I had a file on my desktop and I wanted to just upload the firmware or the BIOS I could be I could do that based on the based on that file right I could just click the link in this version and in this newer version I haven't found where that is yet I don't know if it's still an option that's in there one option that is still there is the activate button though but they're not all you know they're you're not able to really go back and forth all the time for example if I go to the BIOS first of all when you update any of these actually maybe in here if I say update yeah so here we go so you know I can stall based on a file if I want to so I can either say hey you know what I'm going to browse to my desktop and I'm going to install just the BIOS right or I can say I want to install this on a remote server when we bring this up and I could say I want you to you know TFTP the BIOS right so we'll say cancel in the older version these are just a couple of links up here in the up and the left now when you upgrade from here you'll have to activate it so for example if you go into the BMC and you say activate you can see here that it says currently running is 3 but I may want to reactivate - oh I may want to go backwards here's where I would do that but be careful and read the warnings be careful and read the menu when you upgrade based on this so in other words let me go back to Cisco comm when you upgrade based on the ISO image to actually upgrade your firmware this will include everything for that particular server so it will include the BIOS and then include any raid controllers it will include everything that you see here and if there if there's a new version what's in that ISO image will say hey you're currently running you know 24 12 well we now have 24 13 and it will go ahead and allow you to either update just this one or you know you can kind of say a select all and update everything the disk will do everything for you so it will automatically go in and update everything and it will automatically activate it so you won't have to come in here in to activate ok now there's one last thing that I want to show you before I show you the KBM option now we just booted this box up right I mean we've we have some disks installed in fact if I go over here to physical drive info you saw what I clicked if I click the advisory let me just wait for it to finish processing here if I click the advisory and I go to storage and I click on my raid controller here it'll tell me that I have these 4 disks installed right again I clicked on the the RAID controller followed by the physical drive info and you can see I have 2 1 46 gig drives and then 2 400 plus gig drives here I'm going to set these both up into two different raid groups so here is how we would do that it took me I mean it's pretty self-explanatory if you're used to setting up servers but you know just out of curiosity I was googling around to see what was out there and you know there were some good white papers on it but I really couldn't find any fantastic videos so I thought I would make a really fantastic video hence why I'm doing this so we go to controller info and this will give you kind of a status of what you have going on with regards to your controllers right so capabilities it tells you you know based on your existing raid what are the levels supported or based on the existing controller what are the levels supported it'll tell you you know well there's nothing in there and so if we have running so in the running for more it tells you hey this is running firmware for the RAID controller so it gives you information obviously important is the boot drive here right so what we're going to do is we're going to select this link that says create virtual drive from unused physical drives sometimes you may see this option create virtual drive from an existing drive group because we haven't done anything with the box that's not going to be an option we have because right now again we have unused I'm just clicking the physical drive info screen we have unconvicted drives they're in good health but there's nothing on them so we need to create a brand new drive group so let's do that will click create virtual drive from unused disk and this is going to load up so you can I rearranged this no this is going to load up the screen where we have all of the options to create our disk so we're going to select the drop-down we're going to select the raid level we could just say raid 1 save raid 10 right whatever RAID you are going to configure for this particular drive group it's your your preference I'm just going to do one I'm just going to do two mirrored disks right so we'll highlight the disks that we want to be in that particular raid group and we need to move them over to this drive group so we're going to select this arrow here that brings them over to this drive group so here now you can see that we have the drive group if we want to bring it back the other way we can put a check in the box and move it back the other way now in this case I personally am NOT going to change anything here except for the actual name of the group so I'm going to say raid 1 boots so that I know what it is everything else I'm just going to leave by the default and just say create virtual drive so we'll do that it'll do its thing so we'll just wait it goes pretty fast you know it's five or ten seconds or so and now you can see that now we have create virtual drive from an existing drive group because now we've created the drive group so now we'll go ahead and we're going to do the same thing we're going to create another RAID one from the two disks we're going to scroll over from the two disks that are left over and we're going to do the same thing except here we're going to just say storage these guys will be some additional storage that we have again it takes about five to ten seconds not really not a huge catastrophe you just got away net patience then the last thing that we'll do is we'll go over and verify this so we'll click on virtual drive info and we'll see that we have these two drive groups created so what we'll do is we'll initialize them actually we can only do one at a time so we'll say you know what we want to initialize these disks initialization type we'll say fast initialize and then we'll go ahead and we'll do the we'll do the other second when the storage disk so we'll go ahead and put a check in that box and we'll say initialize so now once they're initialized the only thing I'm going to show you it to finish up this video is the KBM option so what we'll do is we'll stop this video right at the point where we're going to go ahead and boot the box and get it to boot off of the VMware ISO image that's currently sitting on my desktop so let me show you how to do that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say launch KVM when I click on this it's going to give me two options either HTML or Java based I prefer Java so I'm going to click that it's going to say hey where do you want this saved so I'm just going to go ahead and say save and it's going to drop down here right to the bottom of my browser so I'm going to click it and it's going to pop open Java you do have to make sure that you are running the supported version of Java for the version of sim see that you're running right in my case I don't care brand-new version a job I just installed brand new firmware if they're compatible I'm happy I say continue so we'll say don't show this again even though next time it probably will will say run and then it's going to open up the KVM now the KBM is going to come up off the screen so let me shrink it down here and let me just show you quickly if you go to the view a lot of times what you'll notice if I say video scaling you notice how the print just got real real small a lot of folks don't like that because when they go to resize this for example if they go like this so they start to move it around it starts to move around the size of the actual font I don't like that so I want to take off the video scaling so that you guys can still somewhat read the screen while while I have it minimizer or smaller now what I'm going to do is I can either override the boot device so in other words what I can do is I can say look I want you to boot via virtual media or I can create this virtual media and I'm going to create because I want to show you how to do it by the way here your power options here as well inside the KB M so I can say power off I can do a warm reboot or I can just you know power cycle the system right so I'm going to say virtual media and I'm going to say activate virtual devices it's going to connect and then it's going to give me a couple of prompts here you're just going to follow the wizard you're just going to follow the options here once it's done well I there's no options there sorry about that I meant options in here when you click the virtual media you'll have three options right so this is going to give you just basically a wizard that you're just going to follow the options it's just two options so you're going to select the brows the brows will be what file do you want to connect to in other words where is that ISO image lived you can see that mine's already here because I had already messed around with this and I figured let me stop and go back and record a video on it so once I have the ISO image all I'm going to do is say map device once I do that you can see that instead of saying map DVD it now has this ISO image selected so what I'll do is I'll power cycle the box I'm going to say you know what I want to reset the system I'm going to power cycle it's also yes and we should in theory in the KVM here we should see this guy power cycle in fact I may want to here there we go so now we said systems Cisco Systems it's going to configure and test a memory here's what I was saying before that your Sims see your Cisco IMC it will give you the MAC address if you want to find out where it's connected to but it also gives you the IP address this guy is the IP that's been given via DHCP now my reservations are set to like infinity you know it's like 9000 years or something stupid like that so this guy's never going to change and I'm okay with that so once this is finished going through its its power on what's going to happen is it's going to give us a boot menu and again if you have not changed your boot order you'll have an option to change the boot order if you if you're just booting up the box for the same time and you want to get into the sim sea you'll have an option to do that as well okay so still booting up I think this actually may have rebooted for some of the changes that I made previously and didn't save so let's just give this a minute here all right so now that we're now that we're coming up you can see I get a Siskel OVA and there's going to be a boot menu right here right so I'm going to go ahead and just select a boot menu anyway so I just press that six but you can see ff2 to run your setup f6 for the boot menu f7 for diag f8 to get into your cincy config so if you want to go ahead you want to set this guy to a static address rather than it being at dhcp you're just going to go ahead and press f8 not really a big deal 192 gigs of memory good deal that's going to be fun once we get gns3 going on this guy gives you the RAID controller just a regular power-on self-test just regular server starting up not really a big deal guys nothing nothing crazy here but it's going to give us a boot menu in a minute even though we've already modified it even though it would already boot off of that ISO image it's still going to give us a boot menu so you can see entering boot selection menu just give it another second it will come up and here we go so you can see that the very first option that I have is cisco virtual KVM the VK vm mapped DVD so basically this is saying that this is that virtual media that I already mapped previously in Tsim see I'm sorry previously up here to that ISO image now I can select other things if I want to okay I can enter setup I could select other virtual media that maybe I've mapped but again I've mapped that virtual DVD so what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to select this and what we'll see is that we boot up into vmware and that's where this video is going to stop and then we'll continue that in another video so let's go ahead and enter and we should see that it says please wait and we're going to go ahead and see it starting into vmware so this is where i'm going to leave you guys i'm actually going to go ahead and and leave this here and i will start a new video and let's get vmware installed on this guy i'll see you guys in the next one bye bye

Channel: XtremeIE

Views: 31,968

Keywords: Cisco, CCNA, CCNp, CCIE, UCS, CIMC

Id: pfWdlPa0EfY

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017