Chetan Parik is a customer support engineer from the Server Virtualization team at the Cisco Technical Assistance Center in Bangalore, India.   This video is the live session given where you can learn about the new product Cisco UCS Central. Topics include the UCS Central, UCS Manager, Firmware upgrade, UCS Central domains and License management among other topics.   Webcast related links: Slides FAQ Ask the Expert ... View more

  Introduction   Chetan Parik is a customer support engineer from the Server Virtualization team at the Cisco Technical Assistance Center in Bangalore, India. He has seven years of total experience. He has worked on a wide range of Cisco data center products such as Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus 1000V. He also has five years of experience on VMware virtualization products.             The following experts were helping Chetan to answer few of the questions asked during the session: Ganesh Kumar K and Pragna Yeraballi. Ganesh and Pragna are working with Chetan in Cisco TAC and are experts in the field.     You can download the slides of the presentation in PDF format here. The related Ask The Expert sessions is available here. The Complete Recording of this live Webcast can be accessed here.   UCS Central- Firmware related Q. What version of UCSM can we manage from UCS central? A. The firmware base verson required is 2.1. Anything proir to 2.1 is not supported   Q. Do you have to be on a specific version of UCSM to add to UCS Central? A. Yes, UCSM version should be 2.1 or later .   Q. Firmware Auto Install also cover the blade level ? A. Yes, firmware auto install covers blade level firmware upgrade also .   Q. Will underlying applications on UCS on UCS central before affected or require downtime when updating the firmware? A. When upgrading the firmware it will be non-disruptive. But note that that the server BIOS upgrade you would need a server reboot.     UCS Central- Upgrade related   Q. Can you upgrade OS drivers via UCS central? A. OS drivers can't be upgarded via UCS central only the UCS firmware can be upgraded.   Q. For firmware upgrade, the UCSC needs internet connectivity? A. Once you have the firmware downloaded to your local machine, you don't need internet connectivity. If you can launch UCS Central from your local machine you can upload the firmware from local machine to UCS Central .   Misc   Q. How about the UCMC itself, can we have primary in region#1 and secondary in region#2 ?­ A. No, we can not have that.   Q.How about the hardisk internal 60gb? Is it raid? Can we map UCS central mapped to external centralized storage? A. You can use any datastore. Internal or an external centralized storage.   Q.UCS Central can be redundant setup within same site and across Dc and DR? A. UCS Central can be deployed on one VM as of now and there is no redundancy.   Q. Can we backup the entire configuration and setup, so in case it fails for any reason can restore all the configs eg. profiles, pools, resource? A. Yes, it can be done. We also support the snapshots of the UCSC VM.   Q. Can we use ipv6 on UCS? A. No, ipv6 can not be used. It can be used on blades but not for the UCSM and Centra l.   Q. Can it be integrated with DNS master and update records? A. Yes, it can be integrated with DNS master.   Q. Do we need to purchase licenses for UCS central domains? A. As of now we don't need any licenses for UCS central domains but in future releases we will need them; although it will be required only if you have more than 5 domains. More than 5 domains will require license in future releases.   Q. How many domains can we register on a UCS central? A. As many as 100 domains can be safely registered on a UCS central.   Q. Do we support replication? A. No, right now there is no replication support.   Q. Can we have the service providers installed on different machines instead of just one? A. Currently all the service providers are compiled into a package as a single VM. Maybe in future they can get seperated.   Q. Can we associate service profiles from the UCS central? A. Not in current release, but this will be a part of future release. In current release we define policies and pools; service profiles and templates will be included in future release of UCS central.   Q. What is the future plan for UCS dashboard? Will this be phased and replaced by UCS central? A. UCS manager dashboard will stay since it provides functionality to manage UCS locally.   Q. What happens to global IDs assigned to the endpoints after unregistering UCSM from UCS central? A. Such global IDs will appear as if they were configured locally on endpoints. For example if a server has UUID configured from local pool and UCS central has gone offline or you have unregistered it, that UUID will appear as if configured locally on the server.   Q. Can we install UCS Central on Physical server? A. As of now, we can't install on a physical server. It has to be a VM.   Q. If for example timezone policy is not available locally, can we reconfigure it to global lookup? A. Yes, we can configure it globally from UCS Central .   Q. Any limitation on how many UCSM can be added to UCS Central? A. We have tested more than 100 UCSM with UCS central. We can manage 100 safely .   Q. What if I have set of conflicliting pools for 2 different UCS Manager,and once I register UCS Central, What kind of errors or risks we can we have? A. You will have faults at the UCS Central when you have conflicting pools.   Q. Interesting such huge numbers are possible! 100+? A. Yes, 100 is tested.   Q. But my understanding says that if I take example of mac pool for my blades, it sits on Layer 2 only and so conflicts should not effect? A. Yes, it is correct. Conflicts will not effect. UCS central will just throw a fault that there are conflciting ID's.   Q. Can we have ucs redundant setup across the region? A. You can manage UCSM in different regions in UCS Cental.   Related Information   Slides of Live Webcast Cisco Support Community Download UCS Central Download UCS Manager Emulator Unified Computing System Support page Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Network Virtualization Data Center Fundamentals ... View more