New to a company with UCS C220's, never used it before

[brockssn]

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to a company and they have 2 UCS M4 C220 servers with no support contract. These servers were re-purposed from some sort of phone system they purchased and never used, so the previous IT guys turned them into independent Hyper-V servers with no network attached storage. I have some work to do myself, but I have a few things I need some assistance with:

1. There doesn't seem to be a UCS Management interface configured for these, there's no Ethernet cable plugged into the management interface port on the back. Any easy to follow guide to get this configured?

2. I need to expand the 2 servers. They have 4 drive bays open on each of them.

     a. What is the recommended budget drives for these things? I received a quote for: UCS-HD18TB10K4KN
1.8TB 12G SAS 10K RPM SFF HDD 4K, but was wondering if any 2.5" 1.8TB SAS drive would work?

     b. If there's already a RAID 5 inside, is there any foreseen problem adding an additional RAID 10 with 4 1.8TB drives, using the existing RAID controller?

[Wes Austin · Accepted solution]

Here is a guide to setup CIMC. You can also youtube some videos, there are a few:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c200-m1-high-density-rack-mount-server/111455-setup-cimc-c-series.html

You should use drives outlined in the spec sheet if you want them to show up correctly and report failed correctly, etc, but any drive that is the same form factor should work. Not sure what you are running on top of the servers, but using 3rd party drives may present more problems than money saved.

If you are using an LSI controller, you can just configure another RAID, assuming the controller supports RAID 10. It should say in CIMC once you get that loaded what RAID the controller supports.