CIMC 2.0.x and FlexFlash partitions for SCU, HUU, Drivers not supported?

[nickhesson]

Hello all,

We are fairly new to UCS, but are hooked for sure.  We started purchasing B series blades, chassises, and FI's at first, and now are in the process of deploying C-Series Servers.  Very cool stuff, then does Cisco takes some of it away, maybe?    

We just purchased a C240, and noticed the FlexFlash card.  After initial reading we see that you can have a Server Configuration Utility (SCU), Host Update Utility (HUU), and Drivers Partitions on the FlexFlash.  Along with a 4th HyperVisor (HV) partition, which started this journey for us as we are going to install ESXi onto the FlexFlash.  

But by the time we got to reading about and managing FlexFlash, we had already upgraded the CIMC & Bios to 2.0(1)b.  We only see the one large ~16GB HV partition, and with SCU 4.0 there isn't much you can do about that.  After reading the release notes for CIMC 2.0, we read:

Starting with this version, the SD storage device is available to Cisco IMC as a single hypervisor (HV) partition configuration. Prior versions had four virtual USB drives.

So does this mean that after CIMC 2.0, SCU, HUU, and Driver Partitions are unsupported on FlexFlash?  Or is there a process to get these utilities back on FlexFlash?  Because the documentation does not really make it clear one way or the other.  It would seem to be a nice feature, but i would also understand why the reasons not to support it.  As I'm sure the HUU updates just as fast as firmware.  

Thanks for your time and support,

Nick

[Keny Perez]

Nick,

What happens is that the other 3 partitions were NOT updated automatically and therefore, the only partition you were going to use all the time, was going to be the HV partition.

Let me put it in this way, the HV partition was available for the customer to install an OS while the SCU, Drivers and HUU partitions used to come with one version, if the customer needed to upgrade the versions available in the other partitions, he/she would still need to go to cisco.com and download the new versions, so (from my point of view, very personal and 99.99% possible not Cisco's word) the partitions then became "not-so-helpful" (the developers might have a deeper explanation).

The HUU, SCU and drivers are still downloadable from cisco.com:

http://software.cisco.com/download/type.html?mdfid=284296253&flowid=31742

Let me know if I was not clear at any part  of the explanation and I will try to expand a little more

-Kenny

[Martinbantz65]

This is very confusing. Just received our first c-class server (220m3) with sd card preinstalled, and reading the online docs about the scu and huu partitions. Great feature! Could not see the partitions in CIMC and believed the sd-card was empty and needed to be initialized.

Followed the flexflash docs to get the card up and running:

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/whitepaper_C11-718938.pdf

Having spent one entire day getting the SD card to work as documented.

Now, after reading this thread, I'm even more confused (and a little frustrated) - and would really like at least the scu to be bootable from the card.

The experiences here are:

1. Booting downloaded iso image SCU via kvm (virtual image)

2. Configure network - dhcp does not work.. (tried earlier SCU, there dhcp does work.. but no update-icon...). Configures manually then.

3. After network is configured, either manually or dhcp - the Update flexflash icon disappeares..

Hitting the Update flexflash icon (after new reboot, without configuring network), a window appear with empty content. DOH.

Booting all day trying different cisco manuals and approaches to get this to work, waiting for the long boot process each time.

I would recommend that the cisco documents online are revised so we don't need to run through loops and endless cisco-pdf-redirections for nothing.

Cheers,

Martin

[Keny Perez]

Martin,

I understand it can be a little frustrating at the beginning but this is not as complicated as it appears to be, just requires some time to play around with it... I went throug the same feeling at the beginning and then just got used to the logic it uses... Anyways, let me know if you have doubts :)

-Kenny