Cisco UCS C220/C240 dedicated management interface

[BVC]

I've be assigned to on board a small amount of Cisco UCS C220s and C240s onto a new DMZ in our network. I've never really worked with UCS but my main concern is getting the management configured correctly. From my understanding there is a dedicated management interface that can be used to access IMC, what I pretty much want is to be able to manage the box itself over this port (with IMC or UCS Manager) and also manage the OS that will be running on the box. From my research there is a vKVM option when you load into IMC but is there just a way to access the OS of the box (e.g. SSH, RDP) from the management interface without going through IMC or UCS Manager. As i want to create a separate out of band management network that manages both the hardware and the OS. 

[Kirk J]

Your design will depend on whether these are stand alone servers, or if they are directly connected to the UCSM.

When connected to the UCSM, you do not connect anything to the 1Gb ports (LOM ports or the CIMC mgmt port), and would use the OOB setup with the UCSM FIs, for KVM access.

Kirk...

[BVC]

They will be standalone so no UCSM, so the only way to access the OS for managment purpose would be over a dedicated data interface, not the managment interface?

[Kirk J]

The CIMC dedicated mgmt interface is not presented to the host OS, and only provides ssh/https type access to the CIMC.  If your OS is Windows, then the vKVM would allow you to login to the GUI and manage it that way.

The CIMC does have SOL/Serial Over Lan, which means you can SSH to the CIMC, issue 'connect host' and then be presented with CLI terminal if the host OS supports that.  For instance, with ESXi, you could use the SOL connection via the CIMC mgmt port to get to the ALT-F1 equivalent CLI of ESXi.

For regular mgmt with vsphere GUI, you would need to have the regular 1Gb ports, VIC card, or other supported card installed with matching OS drivers.

Kirk...