How to manage an old UCS environment

[GrantMorris43639]

Hi there.  I have inherited a UCS environment with absolutely no documentation and of course, no valid support contracts.  I don't even know the IP addresses of some of the hardware.  It seems to be some CE500/C220 M3 and C220 M3BE stand alone servers.  Can anyone tell me what software I can manage these with please?   

Thank you.

[Kirk J]

You may have to physically reboot them in order to see the F8/CIMC config option during post.

If you configure the F8/cimc config, you can reset the admin password, and confirm/set the IP address information.

The CIMC will give a cli and Web interface including remove vKVM for seeing alerts/health, installing OS , etc.

Not sure what a CE500 is, but the C220M3 will let you manage it with a ucsm, and you also can use the IMC Supervisor appliance to manage multiple stand alone rack servers.

At least getting a fix on what your CIMC IP address is and checking firmware versions is a good place to start.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[GrantMorris43639]

Thanks for that feedback.  I'm looking at UCS Infrastructure and UCS Manager Software on Cisco but the files are .bin files so I assume they are supposed to be loaded onto the systems much like ASDM on ASA?  I was expecting to find some Windows tools that one would run on their computer and point at remote IP addresses etc. 

I have done a subnet scan and found some IP addresses with Cisco OUI's that I believe may be the UCS hardware.  Assuming one of those .bin type files is already running on the Cisco hardware, is there a management tool that can be used from a remote computer?

[Kirk J]

UCSM is a software and hardware solution that includes specific equipment (i.e. 6200, 6300, 6400 series FI appliances) running the UCSM software.

If you don't actually have UCSM/Fabric Interconnects, that that won't be an option for you.

It sounds like your best bet is to use the CIMC web interface once you can get it configured with an IP address and known user credentials (default user is 'admin' and default password is 'password' )

As has been mentioned on some other threads, if you have access to esxi ssh/cli, you can run the following command:

enum_instances OMC_IPMIIPProtocolEndpoint root/cimv2 | grep IPv4

and it should return the IP address value (if one is assigned) of the CIMC.

Kirk...