Cisco Unified Computing System Upgrade Best Practices with Payal Bhaduri

[Lisa Latour]

  Cisco subject matter expert Payal Bhaduri will focus on upgrade of Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System). With lots of companies adopting Cisco UCS, there is need to understand the UCS architecture and the complete firmware upgrade procedure which would help customers/partners to maintain and operate the UCS environment effectively.  

Ask questions from July 6, 2015 through July 17, 2015 

Payal Bhaduri is a Customer Support Engineer for Cisco's Data Center Server Virtualization TAC team based in San Jose, California. She has been working in the TAC for close to five years ,with a primary focus on Data Center Technologies such as Cisco UCS  Blade servers including the B series (UCSB), UCS Rack Mount Servers (UCSC), Cisco Nexus 1000v, and Virtualization.  She holds a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Telecommunication and has CCIE Certification (number 36570) in Collaboration and Data Center. She also holds a certification in Virtualization (VCP 5 VMware Certified Professional).

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[bantony10]

Thank you Payal.

Lets assume that we are not affected by bug CSCuh61202.

With above activation order (Overview of the steps for upgrade from 2.1 to 2.2) we are activating  "adapters" and the "CIMC"  in the last  as oppose to earlier releases.

I would like to know what is the specific reason for this.

Best Regards,

Bijoy

[Payal Bhaduri]

Hi Bijoy,

With the earlier releases, there was also an option to upgrade the CIMC and the adapters in the host firmware package as part of the last upgrade step.

This is listed part of the documentation.

"Update adapters and CIMC—If you prefer, you can upgrade the CIMC and the adapters in a host firmware package as part of the last upgrade step. Certain adapters must be upgraded in a host firmware package. "

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/upgrading/from1-4/to2-2/b_UpgradingCiscoUCSFrom1-4To2-2.html

To answer your question as to why the documentation changed was because there were improvements in the interoperability to make upgrade more simple.

Regards,

Payal

[Payal Bhaduri]

Hi Bijoy,

When we activate the IOM firmware, it only applies the firmware once the FI gets rebooted.

Both would work, but I would recommend Option-1 as that is the order that is listed as per the upgrade guide.

Also which is the version you are trying to upgrade from?

If you are upgrading from a release prior to 2.1(3a), you may be impacted by CSCuh61202. This defect affects FC traffic on the Cisco 1240, Cisco 1280, and Cisco M81KR adapters. To avoid this situation and reduce the number of server reboots, you must first upgrade the adapter and server firmware using a host firmware package, and then proceed with the corresponding infrastructure upgrade. This is an exception to the normal upgrade procedure. For more details, refer to https:/​/​tools.cisco.com/​bugsearch/​bug/​CSCuh61202.

Based on the version you are upgrading from, the order of upgrade of blade firmware can change.

Regards,

Payal