Hi John, I would check to see if the assigned/allocated IPs to un-pingable servers respond to an nmap port scan of those IPs, if they do, there may be some Windows or other devices configured to those IPs that is blocking the ICMP packets. Otherwise maybe confirm that the netmask is correct for the IP subnet that they have been allocated from? Hope this helps, -Ramesh
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Hi Julian, I tried this on a fresh Windows 7 Professional N (64bit) VM, let it patch fully, which after patching showed .Net Framework 4.6.1 (394271) as you have in place: and installed the latest PowerShell distribution through Windows Management Framework 5.1 After these steps, I was able to install the PowerTool Suite without issue: Are you sure the error wasn't about PowerShell? If you have PowerShell 3.0 or later installed, my next step would be to try removing .NET Framework, and try to install 4.6.1 without the earlier versions present. Hope this helps, -Ramesh
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Hi Ahmed, In case you're still wondering about this, a UUID will be assigned to each UCS service profile you create. With 5 blade servers, you would need a minimum of 5 UUIDs, though this would be insufficient if you created more service profiles than you have blades for, possibly something you may do while testing configurations. Allocating more UUIDs than you have physical systems is a common practice, though you can add more to your UUID pool at a later date within the UUID tab of your UUID pool. VMs are not allocated UUIDs by UCSM, VM UUIDs will be generated by whatever hypervisor has created them. The MAC address pools (half allocated to A side fabric, half to B side fabric) you will need will once again loosely align with the number of service profiles you end up creating, with the difference that vNICs can account for the need for multiple MAC addresses being allocated. vNICs are virtual equivalents to physical network interfaces that are created for your UCS server when using a Cisco VIC adapter. A general convention within UCS is to have an A side interface, and a B side equivalent adapter carrying the same traffic that can be brought into the OS deployed to the server and treated through OS level redundancy as bonded or teamed interfaces. Maximum static vNICs will be 32 according to the UCS 3.1 Configurations Limits Guide, though this number will be limited to two for non VIC UCS adapters (Emulex,Qlogic,Intel). More than 2 vHBAs can be allocated to a service profile as the previously mentioned Configurations Limits Guide shows, but standard convention will be two have 2 vHBAs, which will required 1 WWNN, 1 WWPN for fabric A, and 1WWPN for fabric B. Hope this helps, -Ramesh
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Hi Navin, Kind of a side note, but your service profiles will only need a reboot if the new boot policy is check marked for "Reboot on Boot Order Change". This can be handy if the new boot policy stays consistent with what device is actively booted to the system, and only differs with things like vMedia mounting. Specific to your original question, with UsrAck set in the maintenance policy, and the new boot policy being flagged, my expectation was that it would be the individual affected components, but wasn't certain that it wouldn't trigger a larger Ack of all dependent components. To test it I created an equivalent boot policy with Reboot on Boot Order Change, and changed one of my templates to point to this. The resulting Pending Activities does show the capacity to individually remediate the impacted servers: On yet another side note, I confirmed another aspect of the behavior I expected, where an OS initiated reboot of one of the affected servers does clear the Pending Activities flag for that server within UCSM. As you'll see below, a reboot of one of my blade-3 server through its installed OS has cleared it from the list: Hope this helps. -Ramesh
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We have released a white paper that covers the configuration of the Cisco UCS resources of a FlashStack converged infrastructure using the Cisco UCS PowerTool Suite , as an addendum to the FlashStack Virtual Server Infrastructure for VMware vSphere 6.0 U2 Deployment Guide . As someone who develops a bit of anxiety outside of a bash shell, this isn't a deep dive into MS PowerShell use with the Cisco UCS PowerTool Suite, but an example of the kind of fast functionality that can be attained with just a few PowerTool PowerShell cmdlets. The white paper starts off fairly quickly showing that UCS XML commands can be collected from the UCS HTML GUI by pressing Record XML (which will be exposed in the GUI after pressing the command sequence of Ctrl + Alt + q): This recorded XML file can be used to generate equivalent PowerTool PowerShell cmdlets with ConvertTo-UCSCmdlet: The white paper has collected generated cmdlets for all of the UCS configuration steps used in the FlashStack VSI Deployment Guide, and placed them in sequence with their original UCSM GUI steps for comparison. To verify the functionality of the cmdlets discussed in the white paper, both UCS Fabric Interconnects were erased and reconfigured using these cmdlets. Cisco UCS PowerTool doesn't replace the automation capabilities found in a tool like Cisco UCS Director, but does provide a powerful option to add to the arsenal of resources in managing Cisco UCS placements. For the latest release, and more information on Cisco UCS PowerTool, please visit their Cisco Communities page.
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