Management IP address of blade servers

[sqambera]

Hello,

Could anyone please help me to know what path is being followed to reach the management ip addresses of the blade servers in chassis? To be more specific, lets say I have management interfaces of my fabric interconnects connected to the management switch network. When I ping the management ip addresses of the blades, does that ping passes through the management interface of the FIs? Can I assign different subnet IPs to server management subnet than FI management interfaces?

Could anyone also share a document that depicts all this architecture?

Thanks,

Qamber

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

Hi Qamber

Lets be very clear: management IP address of the blade = IP address of CIMC, which you eg. access by KVM.

There are 2 modes:

- out of band which is accessed over the 1G management port of the fabric interconnect

- in band which is accessed over a 10G uplink interface of the fabric interconnect

see the discussion in

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12185011/management-blades-outband-and-inband-ip

CIMC Inband Management

A driving factor for providing inband management access to Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) is the desire to separate tenant traffic from provider traffic in multi-tenant, public or private service provider cloud deployments. Out-of-band (OOB) management traffic moves in and out of the fabric interconnects and traverses the management plane via the management port. This has the potential to cause bottlenecks and affect the CPU bandwidth in the management ports.

Inband management allows CIMC traffic to take the same path as the data traffic, entering and exiting the fabric interconnects via the uplink ports. The higher bandwidth available to the uplink ports means that inband access greatly speeds up management traffic, and reduces the risk of traffic bottlenecks and CPU stress. Both out-of-band (OOB) and inband address pools can be configured for management access in Cisco UCS Manager. Out-of-band access only supports IPv4 addresses. Inband access supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which allows for single or dual stack management.

The two OOB management interface addresses that can be configured in Cisco UCS Manager blade and rack servers are:

• An OOB IPv4 address assigned to the physical server via the global ext-mgmt pool
• An OOB IPv4 address derived from a service profile associated with the physical server

In addition, up to four inband management interface addresses can be configured:

• An inband IPv4 address assigned to the physical server
• An inband IPv4 address derived from a service profile associated with the physical server
• An inband IPv6 address assigned to the physical server
• An inband IPv6 address derived from a service profile associated with the physical server

Multiple inband management IP addresses for each server support additional CIMC sessions. When you configure both OOB and inband addresses, users can choose from a list of those addresses in the KVM Console dialog box when they launch KVM from a server, SSH to SoL, a service profile, the KVM Launch Manager, or from the Cisco UCS Manager GUI web URL.

CIMC inband access supports the following services:

• KVM Console

• SSH to CIMC for SoL

• vMedia for ISO, virtual CD/DVD, removable disk, and floppy

Note	Only Cisco UCS M3 and M4 servers support inband CIMC access. Inband CIMC access for Cisco UCS M1 and M2 servers is not supported.

[sqambera]

Many Thanks Walter for the detailed and very useful explanation.

Regards,

Qamber