Cisco is pleased to announce the release of UCS Manager 3.2(3a) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3a) today. These releases address critical security vulnerabilities, provide support for new hardware and accessories, and extend diagnostic capabilities.
UCS Manager 3.2(3) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3) included update processor microcode that helps mitigate the Spectre Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) vulnerabilities when used with hypervisor and operating system patches. These releases provide the mitigation for Cisco UCS M3, M4, and M5 server families as well as Cisco Hyperflex M4 and M5 Hyperconverged server families. There are also UCS Manager 3.2(2), 3.1(3), and 2.2(8) and Cisco IMC 3.1(2) and 3.0(4) patches being released that also provide the Spectre Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) mitigations. For additional details, please see the Cisco Security Advisor at https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180104-cpusidechannel.
With the UCS Manager 3.2(3) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3) releases, Cisco introduced support for the S3260 M5 Server Node. This upgrade to the Cisco S3260 Storage Server Node adds support for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family, and in particular the Skylake processor.
These releases also add support for NVMe based versions of the C220 M5, C240 M5, and C480 M5 servers. Both the C220 M5 and C240 M5 NVMe servers support up to 10 NVMe drives. The C480 M5 server supports up to 32 NVMe drives - up to 24 NVMe drives in the front drive cages and up to an additional 8 NVMe drives in the optional top mount drive cage.
In addition to the upgrades for the S3260 Storage Server and the NVMe versions of the C220 M5, C240 M5, and C480 M5 servers, this release adds support for a number of new peripherals. These include the Nvidia P100 CPU and numerous hard drives and SSDs. Please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes for additional details.
UCS Manager 3.2(3) improves the firmware deployment update process by allowing users to stage the Infrastructure firmware (A Bundle), Host Firmware (B/C Bundles) as well as the chassis firmware for S3260 without activating the firmware. This deploys the selected firmware to the secondary/backup firmware location and is a non-disruptive operation. This allows customers to activate the firmware at a later time and reduces the maintenance window required to upgrade firmware.
Finally, UCS Manager 3.2(3) enhances the Integrated Diagnostics to support UCS C-Series M5 servers in addition to the existing support for B-Series servers. This will help troubleshoot hardware errors - especially memory related errors - on UCS C-Series servers connected to UCS Fabric Interconnects.
There are other enhancements in UCS Manager 3.2(3) which aren’t listed here. For additional details about this release, please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes or the applicable release notes for the other releases. You can download UCS Manager 3.2(3a) today from Cisco.com.
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