Fixing/Rebuilding UCS Chassis/ESXi

[CiscoNovice011]

Hello,

I recently was tasked with recovering/fixing a lab UCS system. The intent is to install ESXi. The chassis is not functioning correctly for multiple reasons. I have a lot of questions and not sure how to get direct questions for the particular scenario. Sometime ago the lab went down and previous networking group was unable to determine why. In there attempts to fix it made change to many aspects of UCS. Some of these changes lead to more problems. After they left, we found that the storage for the lap was down, the Synology NAS was broke. 

Here is where my questions come.

1. The NAS was replaced and the drives were added to the new NAS, what needs to be configured so that the UCS knows where to look for the new NAS?

2. Do all the servers have to be functional to install ESXi? Currently only 2 of them are not showing faults or failing to power on. The two that are on say "Unavailable" in Avail State.

3. Do I have to use CICM to check for LAN storage? Currently, I only have access to the UCS. 

4. The servers do not have any hard drives install in them, do they need to?

5. The Firmware seems to be pretty out of date, is it necessary to update that first before I can do anything else?

6. Before I got access to the KVM, because the KVM manager would work, I could only access it through the IP address of the server. I tried to install the ESXi directly on the server using the consol. When I got to the point to install, the only hard drive option was the flash drive. Is the KVM the only way to install ESXi?

Thank you for any help.

[Steven Tardy]

A lot to unpack there, but here goes.

1] If the NAS was replaced then whatever is different (IPs/iSCSI LUNs/FC WWNs/etc) would need to be updated to the correct values on the UCSM Service Profiles.

2] No. Each server should be independent so one not working should not impact another. The "Unavailable" is expected/good Avail State if the UCS Service Profile is associated to a physical server.

3] CIMC wouldn't know about LAN storage as that is configured in UCSM under that Service Profile Storage or Boot Policy.

4] Nope Servers do NOT require local storage. Diskless servers can boot from SAN/LAN/etc depending on what remote storage devices speak what protocols.

5] Firmware updates would be good to prevent hitting some known/fixed bugs, but the servers should operate just fine without firmware upgrades. Probably should upgrade firmware, but should NOT be required. . . . in theory.

6] KVM is not the only way to install ESXi but is probably the most straightforward. From UCSM simply right click a server and click [KVM console]. Then enable remote vMedia and mount the .iso. My guess is ESXi didn't see any storage because of #1.

Sounds like you could use some basic UCS training. UCS is quite complex and sometimes non-obvious, but also super powerful.