Late last week, UCS Manager 3.0(2) for UCS Mini was released on Cisco.com. I am pleased to announce that this release has a number of key enhancements for the UCS Mini platform.
The first major enhancement is in server platform support. UCS Manager 3.0(1) supported the B200 M3 blade server as well as the C220 M3 and the C240 M3 rack mount servers. This release adds support for the B200 M4, B420 M3, and B22 M3 blade servers as well as the C220 M4 and C240 M4 rack mount servers.
The second major area of enhancement are additional features for UCS Manager running on UCS Mini. These include:
- Support for Fibre Channel NPV mode
- Support for Ethernet Switch mode
- Power Capping enhancements to better track and manage power consumption
- The ability to update Power Supply Firmware on the Dual Voltage power supplies
- Support for GPU cards in UCS Mini connected C-Series servers
- Support for Fusion I/O cards for both blade servers and rack-mount servers connected to UCS Mini
- Support for 3rd party CNA, NIC, and HBA adaptors for C-Series servers when they are connected to UCS Mini using a VIC card
- LR transceiver support for 100m cables
- Features from UCS Manager 2.2(2) and 2.2(3) including:
- eNIC driver enhancements
- Tunable fNIC
- Scriptable vMedia
- Call Home Enhancements
- SCVMM R2 support for VMFEX
- Netflow
As with UCS Manager 3.0(1), there are some UCS Manager features that are not supported in UCS Manager 3.0(2) at this time, including USNIC, VXLAN, and NVGRE. These details are highlighted in the UCS Manager 3.0 release notes available on Cisco.com.
The third significant change in UCS Manager 3.0(2) is a new HTML 5 based GUI. I have definitely heard of the challenges of using Java Runtime Environments from many customers. This is a major step in improving this experience for our customers. The look and feel of the HTML 5 GUI is substantially similar to the current Java-based GUI so that there will be a minimal learning curve for existing customers. To also facilitate a smooth transition for customers, the HTML 5 GUI will be available along with the Java-based GUI for multiple releases. While this HTML 5 GUI is available for UCS Mini today, we are looking forward to bringing it to classic UCS in the future. Finally, I should note that launching a KVM instance does still require a Java Runtime Environment version 1.6 or higher.
While UCS Manager 3.0(2) is a platform specific release for UCS Mini, it should be noted that multiple instances and different versions of UCS Manager can be managed through UCS Central 1.2 and newer. UCS Central works with all versions of UCS Manager starting with UCS Manager 2.1(2) and newer where they are running on classic UCS Fabric Interconnects or the new UCS Mini 6324 Fabric Interconnect.
We believe that this release for UCS Mini will provide a lot of additional product and feature support for UCS Mini customers and provide a preview of a new HTML 5 GUI that will be more broadly rolled out in the future.
