UCS Manager release upgrade advise

[dani_bosch]

Hello,

We have a UCS infrastructure with UCS Manager 2.0(3) release and vSphere 4.1.

Now we'd like to upgrade our vSphere infrastructure to 5.1 version. Taking into consideration that UCS Manager 2.0(3) doesn't support vSphere 5.1, is there any benefit in upgrading UCS Manager to 2.0(4) or to 2.0(5) compared to upgrading it to the very last 2.1(1) release? I'm thinking about stability, or maybe other reasons...??

Thanks,

[gkumark]

Hi Dani,

We have few new features in 2.1 such as FC direct attached storage, Multi Hop FCoE etc.  You can refer to

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/UCS_28313.html for more details on that.

If you upgrade to 2.0(4) or 2.0(5) you would lose out on above features. In 2.0(4) and 2.0(5) majorly we have bug fixes and support for additional hardware. Refer to

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/OL_25363.html#wp58530 for more details.

-Ganesh

[dani_bosch]

But again, if I don't need these new features, would it be fair to say 2.0(5) is potentially more stable than 2.1(1) since is an older and widely tested code train? Or that is not true?

[Robert Burns · Accepted solution]

Yes  - Any build train that is more mature (ie. patched more frequently) should inheritly be more stable.  When you introduce new features, such as the case for 2.1 there are many fixes added after we discover strange things customers are trying to do with the product.  It's impossible to QA a product for every customer & deployment disparity.

If you don't need the new features, specific HW or SW OS support, then stay with the current 2.0 train.  It's just more mature than 2.1.  We should have our first 2.1 patch coming in a couple months tentatively.  At that time I'd start promoting the 2.1 as being the more stable & recommended build.

Regards,

Robert

[CloudySky]

My Cisco rep also steered me away from 2.1, until one or two patch versions are out. Renaming of service profiles is the biggest enhancement for me, but that's not critical. So I'm playing it patient and waiting for stable spring/summer releases.