Ask the Expert: Demystifying Unified Computing System (UCS) Interfaces for troubleshooting

[ciscomoderator]

Ask your questions following the Live webcast, March 17, 2015 ending March 25th

Ever wonder what VFC, VETH, VIF and HIF are in UCS and which path your packets are taking?   UCS infrastructure has several virtual components and this makes it challenging to troubleshoot but it is critical to understand. In this Webcast, Niles will discuss UCS interfaces and how packets travels from the UCS server. This includes what happens when a packet leaves a server from the vnic until it traverses the Fabric interconnect.  Once you understand the data path, you will be able to troubleshoot the Unified Computing System

Niles Pyelshak is a Customer Support Engineer for Cisco TAC works in Server Virtualization Team.  She has several years of networking and virtualization experience.  She recently passed her CCIE Certification in Data Center (#44608). As a Network Engineer, Niles was accustomed to getting on the command line interface (CLI) to configure and build her network. In server virtualization it is a little different. She is always amazed at how servers are mostly managed by Graphical User Interface(GUI) interfaces and CLI.  One can not underestimate the power of both interfaces and in this Webcast, Niles will leverage both GUI and CLI to demonstrate the UCS life of a packet.

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[Mariana Llamas]

What is the difference between the VIC 1240 with Expander and the VIC 1280?

[Jean Paul Enerst]

Hi Niles,

Before all thanks for the help...

I am about to add new blade into our current Chassis... Is there some "gotchas" that I need to be carefully about?

Thanks

[Niles Pyelshak]

Hello Jean,

Thanks for participating in our support community.  We truly appreciate it!

Q.  I am about to add new blade into our current Chassis... Is there some "gotchas" that I need to be carefully about?

A.  No there isn't.  UCS will discover the the blade when inserted into the chassis.  One thing to be cognizant of is that, new blade will most likely come with a different firmware or newer firmware.  That's not an issue because you can auto sync the firmware, upgrade firmware on blade directly, or use a host firmware package.  In the later option, you can set your Service Profile policy to downgrade/upgrade the firmware on the blade during association to meet your environment.

Here is the documentation of how to do this:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/firmware-mgmt/gui/2-2/b_GUI_Firmware_Management_22/b_GUI_Firmware_Management_22_chapter_0111.html

It should be just that easy.  If anything weird happen, you may want to have TAC look at it.

HTH,

/Niles