Cisco is pleased to announce the release of UCS Manager 4.0(1) and Cisco IMC Software 4.0(1) this week. These releases provide support for new hardware platforms, security vulnerability fixes, additional accessories, and more.    Cisco UCS Manager 4.0(1) introduces support for the fourth generation of UCS Fabric Interconnects (FI), the 6454 FI. This Fabric Interconnect is a replacement for the 6246 Fabric Interconnect. It provides 40 ports of 10 or 25Gb Ethernet, 8 unified ports of 10/25Gb Ethernet or 8/16/32Gb Fibre Channel, plus 6 ports that support 40Gb or 100Gb Ethernet. This Fabric Interconnect will be helpful for customers who want to take advantage of 25Gb Ethernet or 32Gb Fibre Channel connections for increased bandwidth for key applications.   Both Cisco UCS Manager 4.0(1) and Cisco IMC 4.0(1) also provide support for the fourth generation Virtual Interface Card (VIC) known as the 1400 series VIC. The VIC 1400 series VICs are well matched with the 6454 Fabric Interconnects and offer 10/25Gb Ethernet for UCS C-Series and S-Series servers and 10/40Gb Ethernet for UCS B-Series servers. The VIC 1400 series cards offer additional support for offloading and other performance enhancing features, as detailed in the blog at https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/fast-flexible-new-4th-gen-fabric-interconnect-and-vic.   Cisco UCS Manager 4.0(1) and Cisco IMC 4.0(1) also add support for the new Cisco C4200 Series Rack Server Chassis that supports two to four C125 M5 Rack Server Nodes in a 2U chassis. The C125 M5 server is the first Cisco UCS server that offers the AMD (R) EPYC(TM) processor. The C4200 Chassis and C125 M5 Rack Server Nodes are ideal for organizations that are looking for high density compute.   In addition to these key new platforms, Cisco IMC 4.0(1) and UCS Manager 4.0(1) add support for a S3260 SIOC, additional peripherals, and additional software enhancements. These releases will be supported by Cisco Intersight, UCS Director, and other existing tools in the UCS management ecosystem. More details can be found in the UCS Manager 4.0 Release Notes and the Cisco IMC Software 4.0(1) Release Notes.   Finally, both Cisco IMC Software 4.0(1) and UCS Manager 4.0(1) address numerous defect fixes and security vulnerabilities. In particular, these release include updated microcode from Intel that helps mitigate Spectre variants 3A and 4 as well as the L1 Terminal Fault vulnerabilities when used with the appropriate operating system and/or hypervisor patches. Additional details can be found in the Cisco Security Advisories (3A/4 and L1TF) and the release notes.   You can download UCS Manager 4.0(1) at https://software.cisco.com/download/home/283612660/type/283655658/release/4.0%25281a%2529 and Cisco IMC Software 4.0(1) from https://software.cisco.com/download/home/282896919.   ... View more

Cisco is pleased to announce the release of UCS Manager 3.2(3a) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3a) today. These releases address critical security vulnerabilities, provide support for new hardware and accessories, and extend diagnostic capabilities. UCS Manager 3.2(3) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3) included update processor microcode that helps mitigate the Spectre Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) vulnerabilities when used with hypervisor and operating system patches. These releases provide the mitigation for Cisco UCS M3, M4, and M5 server families as well as Cisco Hyperflex M4 and M5 Hyperconverged server families. There are also UCS Manager 3.2(2), 3.1(3), and 2.2(8) and Cisco IMC 3.1(2) and 3.0(4) patches being released that also provide the Spectre Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) mitigations. For additional details, please see the Cisco Security Advisor at https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180104-cpusidechannel. With the UCS Manager 3.2(3) and Cisco IMC 3.1(3) releases, Cisco introduced support for the S3260 M5 Server Node. This upgrade to the Cisco S3260 Storage Server Node adds support for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family, and in particular the Skylake processor. These releases also add support for NVMe based versions of the C220 M5, C240 M5, and C480 M5 servers. Both the C220 M5 and C240 M5 NVMe servers support up to 10 NVMe drives. The C480 M5 server supports up to 32 NVMe drives - up to 24 NVMe drives in the front drive cages and up to an additional 8 NVMe drives in the optional top mount drive cage. In addition to the upgrades for the S3260 Storage Server and the NVMe versions of the C220 M5, C240 M5, and C480 M5 servers, this release adds support for a number of new peripherals. These include the Nvidia P100 CPU and numerous hard drives and SSDs. Please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes for additional details. UCS Manager 3.2(3) improves the firmware deployment update process by allowing users to stage the Infrastructure firmware (A Bundle), Host Firmware (B/C Bundles) as well as the chassis firmware for S3260 without activating the firmware. This deploys the selected firmware to the secondary/backup firmware location and is a non-disruptive operation. This allows customers to activate the firmware at a later time and reduces the maintenance window required to upgrade firmware. Finally, UCS Manager 3.2(3)  enhances the Integrated Diagnostics to support UCS C-Series M5 servers in addition to the existing support for B-Series servers. This will help troubleshoot hardware errors - especially memory related errors - on UCS C-Series servers connected to UCS Fabric Interconnects. There are other enhancements in UCS Manager 3.2(3) which aren’t listed here. For additional details about this release, please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes or the applicable release notes for the other releases. You can download UCS Manager 3.2(3a) today from Cisco.com. ... View more

Update - January 20, 2018 Intel released a statement today with additional information about a reboot issue associated with the microcode update for Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake and other processors, and is advising customers to not deploy select versions of the previously provided microcode. As a result Cisco removed UCS Manager 3.2(2e) and Cisco IMC 3.1(2e) from Cisco.com over the weekend. Intel also confirmed that they have identified the root cause for the reboot issues on these platforms, and have provided the first beta version to vendors, including Cisco , for testing. While we work closely with Intel to finalize a solution to remediate the involved issues as quickly as possible, Cisco will hold deploying new releases of microcode updates for UCS Manager and Cisco IMC software.  For further updates from Intel click here . For further updates from Cisco, please see the Cisco Security Advisory. Update - January 17th Intel has just announced that the M5 firmware that Cisco released on January 16th is also impacted by the reboot issue that was previously seen on M4 platforms. It also impacts M3 platforms. Customers should consider the reboot impact prior to deploying the new UCS Manager 3.2(2e) or Cisco IMC Software 3.1(2e) versions. We will update our guidance as we receive additional information. The Intel advisory also provides some performance impact data, and specifically highlights the minimal impact on CPU and memory intensive workloads. The Intel advisory is available at https://newsroom.intel.com/news/firmware-updates-and-initial-performance-data-for-data-center-systems/ January 16th Earlier today, the Cisco UCS team released UCS Manager 3.2(2e) and Cisco IMC Software 3.1(2e) (and here and here). These releases include the Intel microcode 0x0200003A for Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors used in the Cisco UCS M5 generation B-Series, C-Series, and Hyperflex M5 servers. Operating System patches together with this Intel CPU microcode mitigate CVE-2017-5715, also known as Spectre/Variant 2. For further details, please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes or the Cisco IMC Software 3.1(2) Release Notes. Cisco preferred to release a single UCS Manager patch that supports updated microcode for all of the Cisco UCS and Hyperflex M5, M4, M3 and M2 platforms. However, due to the Intel disclosure on issues with the microcode vulnerability fix for the Broadwell and Haswell processors used in Cisco UCS and Hyperflex M4 servers causing servers to potentially reboot, Cisco will not release the previously provided microcode for M4 servers but wait for an updated version of the microcode. There will also be a follow-on impact to the availability of microcode for Cisco UCS M3 and M2 platforms. We do not have detailed dates at this time to provide firmware for Cisco UCS and Hyperflex M4, M3, and M2 systems. Cisco will update the Cisco Security Advisory at https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20180104-cpusidechannel with revised dates as they become available. Please note that as has been widely reported in the industry, the mitigation for Spectre/Variant 2 [CVE-2017-5715] may impact the observed performance of servers. In Cisco’s testing, we are seeing little impact for CPU and memory constrained workloads. Where we are seeing an impact is with I/O intense workloads, especially with local or SAN-based storage with sequential reads and sequential writes. While there is a significant amount of variation on the various tests that we’ve run, we are often seeing a 10-20% decrease in IOPs where there is both sequential reads and writes, an increase in processor utilization on average below 10%, and at times, an increase in latency. Customer and partner discussions over the past week have provided similar performance feedback.  Other posts on performance impacts from RedHat and Microsoft may also be useful to understand the industry wide performance impacts. As always, your results will vary for your workloads, system overhead and applications. We hope that this blog post provides further information to supplement the Cisco PSIRT Advisory and the initial UCS Response to Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities blog post. UCS Manager 3.2(2e) and Cisco IMC Software are available for download now. ... View more

Cisco has released UCS Manager 3.2(2) which is available on Cisco.com. UCS Manager 3.2(2) provides support for: Cisco UCS B480 M5 servers and accessories Cisco UCS C480 M5 servers and accessories Support for Secure Encrypted Drives (SED) for Hyperflex M5 servers Node Manager power management support for Cisco UCS M5 B-Series Servers Option to paste passwords into the login password field Support for additional GPUs, NVMe devices, and additional M.2 storage options. Please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release notes for additional information. ... View more

Cisco has released UCS Manager 3.2(1) which is available on Cisco.com. UCS Manager 3.2(1) provides support for UCS M5 generation servers as well as enablement for the next generation UCS management platform. UCS Manager 3.2(1) provides support for the UCS M5 generation servers with the Intel Purley architecture and Skylake CPUs. In particular, UCS Manager 3.2(1) adds support for the B200 M5, C220 M5, and C240 M5. It also pre-enables support for the Cisco Hyperflex HX 220 M5, HX 240 M5, HXAF 220 M5, and HXAF 240 M5. In addition to support for the servers, UCS Manager 3.2(1) adds support for a wide variety of accessories, including NVMe drives, additional hard drives, Fibre Channel cards, additional Nvidia GPUs and much more. Please see the UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes for additional details. From a software perspective, UCS Manager 3.2(1) enables support for the next generation UCS Management platform. This cloud-based management platform provides easy adoption through a device connector that will provide access to new UCS server management functionality. While details of the functionality of the next generation UCS management platform will be available when it is released, this provides a convenient method to take advantage of the new functionality when customers are ready to use it without having to do an additional software or hardware upgrade. All that will be needed is to sign-up for the new platform, point the device connector to the cloud-based management platform by configuring any HTTP proxy information, claim the appropriate devices, and start taking advantage of new features and functions. The UCS Manager 3.2 Release Notes provide additional detail on platforms, features, accessories, and defect fixes. You can download UCS Manager 3.2(1) today from Cisco.com. ... View more

Video Link : 16231 I am pleased to announce the Cisco has released UCS Manager version 3.1(3), with significant user productivity improvements as well as support for new hardware. It is available for download from Cisco.com. The included video also has a summary of the new features. UCS Manager 3.1(3) brings a number of key enhancements that will improve the productivity of UCS users and administrators. First, there is a HTML 5 KVM client for M3 and M4 generation servers. This provides customers an option to have a Java-free environment, although the Java KVM client is still available for older M2 generation servers. A second major enhancement in UCS Manager 3.1(3) is the Light Weight Upgrades functionality. This will provide customers the option of deploying security updates via UCS Manager Service Packs. Service Packs will only update impacted components rather than all of the software components at the same time. This provides smaller downloads, faster installation, and in many cases, Infrastructure Firmware service packs may be applied without rebooting the UCS Fabric Interconnects, reducing maintenance windows. UCS Manager 3.1(3) also integrates UCS Server Diagnostics into UCS Manager for B-Series servers. This is a UCS Manager integrated replacement of the standalone UCS Blade Server Diagnostics. It allows offline diagnostics to be run on one or more systems directly from UCS Manager without needing to manually boot an ISO through the KVM client on each system. In addition, the diagnostics results are available in a central location. The integrated Server Diagnostics also provides enhanced memory diagnostics to better identify memory errors and speed up the troubleshooting process. From a security perspective, UCS Manager already supports Secure Encrypted Drives (SED) to provide data encryption at rest. UCS Manager 3.1(3) introduces Key Management for Secure Encrypted Drives. UCS Manager 3.1(3) can provide local key management through UCS Manager. In addition, UCS Manager 3.1(3) supports industry-standard key management servers (KMIP) to allow integration with 3rd party key management. Cisco UCS continues to provide additional GPU support in UCS Manager 3.1(3). For NVIDIA GPUs, it introduces a new policy to set the graphics mode on the NVIDIA GPUs in addition to the integrated GPU firmware management that was previously released. In addition to this new policy, UCS Manager 3.1(3) introduces support for the NVIDIA M10 and P100 GPUs. UCS Manager 3.1(3) also introduces support for additional hardware options. For the S3260 server, it provides support for dual RAID controllers as well as dual HBA controllers. In addition, the S3260 now supports connecting a single integrated server to dual SIOCs, providing additional redundancy. There is also support for additional Fibre Channel cards up to 32Gb and Ethernet adaptors. On the network side, there are network scale enhancements. This includes supporting 3000 VLANs on the UCS 6332 and 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects. The number of supported appliance ports increased to 16 ports for the UCS 6248, 6296, 6332, and 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects. Finally, the number of primary VLANs in a PVLAN domain was increased to 150, and the ratio of primary VLANs to secondary VLANs was increased to 200:1, for the UCS 6248 and 6296 Fabric Interconnects. There are a number of additional features and defect fixes that are listed in the UCS Manager 3.1 Release Notes. Please see them for additional details. Lastly, UCS Manager 3.1(3) will be the final release for the UCS Manager 3.1 code train, with a new version of UCS Manager expected later this year. This means that UCS Manager 3.1(3) will be the primary patch point for the UCS Manager 3.1 code train. We encourage customers who are looking to upgrade to the UCS Manager 3.1 code train to strongly consider moving to UCS Manager 3.1(3) for the new features, the latest defect fixes, and ongoing patches. ... View more

In September 2016, Cisco released UCS Manager 3.1(2). It is available for download on Cisco’s website. UCS Manager 3.1(2) has a number of key software and hardware support enhancements. From a hardware perspective, the biggest enhancement is support for the C3260 High Capacity Storage server under UCS Manager. The C3260 is a single or dual-server, high density, bare-metal, x86-based enterprise storage server. With UCS Manager 3.1(2), UCS now offers chassis profiles and chassis firmware package management in addition to the storage profiles that were previously offered and are widely used with C3260 servers. In addition, existing C3260 users can use them with UCS Manager 3.1(2) and retain their current disk configuration to get policy-based management without having to re-configure the server. C3260 servers are often used in big data, cloud, object storage, and content delivery workloads where servers with a large number of drives are helpful. UCS Manager 3.1(2) also adds support for a large number of additional servers and server accessories. These include B420 M4, B260 M4, B460 M4, and C460 M4 servers with the Intel E5-4600 v4 or Intel E7-8800 v4 series CPUs.  In addition, there is support for additional network adaptors, NVMe PCIe cards and SSDs, drives, SAS HBAs, Secure Encrypted Drives, NVIDIA GPUs, and more. For details on all the additional hardware that is supported in UCS Manager 3.1(2), please see the UCS Manager 3.1 Release Notes at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/CiscoUCSManager-RN-3-1.html. In addition to the many new hardware options, there are also a large number of software enhancements offered in UCS Manager 3.1(2). Most of these enhancements improve the operation of UCS Manager including factory reset of servers, vNIC redundancy pairs to keep redundant vNICs in sync, power management enhancements, and much more. However, the most visible changes are with the UCS Manager 3.1(2) HTML 5 GUI. It now has icons down the side of the left hand navigation pane instead of tabs across the top, you can close the left hand navigation pane by clicking on the icon, improved topology maps, and colors and icons that are more consistent across the UCS portfolio. For additional details on all the new software enhancements in UCS Manager 3.1(2), please see the UCS Manager 3.1(2) Release Notes. UCS Manager 3.1(2) is available today on Cisco’s website. ... View more

Adopt the Power of Unification, Innovation, and Security with UCS Manager 3.1 Cisco is pleased to announce the release of the next version of UCS Manager, UCS Manager 3.1(1e). It is now available for download on Cisco.com. UCS Manager 3.1 Key Enhancements UCS Manager 3.1(1) has a number of key updates. These include: Unified Release for 6200 series, 6324, and 6332 series Fabric Interconnects HTML 5 based User Interface “On Next Reboot” Maintenance Policy VIF/interface status check after firmware upgrade reboot Option to exclude specific server components from host firmware packages Support for 6332 series Fabric Interconnects including 40Gb Ethernet and 16 Gb Fibre Channel support Support for M-Series cartridges with Intel Xeon E3 v4 Processors Support for a second chassis in a UCS Mini configuration Support for NVIDIA M6 (B-Series) and M60 (C-Series) GPUs Support for the Magma PCIe Expansion Chassis with K1, K2, K40 and K80 GPUs Support for PCIe Based Storage Accelerators Support for an Intel Crypto Card when used with MITG software And much more This will allow UCS customers to simplify their UCS environment will support for UCS Mini, M-Series, and classic UCS platforms in the same UCS Manager release. In addition, it provides support for the latest Fabric Interconnect technology allowing 40 Gb Ethernet and 16 Gb Fibre Channel to increase networking speed in the data center. Finally, there multiple hardware options allow customers to use their environments for additional workloads. There are additional new features, not all of which may be noted here. Please be aware that as we have been communicating in the past, this is the first major release to drop support for older UCS hardware such as first generation servers and Fabric Interconnects. For the most detailed information, please see the UCS Manager 3.1(1) Release Notes. HTML 5 User Interface UCS Manager first released a HTML 5 User Interface with UCS Manager 3.0(2) for UCS Mini. UCS Manager 3.1(1) brings that user interface to all UCS Manager 3.1 supported platforms. The look and feel of the interface is almost the same as with the Java interface to make it easy to transition for existing customers. While UCS Manager and the UCS KVM Manager are both HTML 5 based, the KVM client still requires a Java client. Finally, the Java client for UCS Manager and the UCS KVM Manager are also still available. On Next Reboot Maintenance Policy Another customer requested user enhancement is for a new UCS maintenance policy called On Next Reboot. In the past, UCS Manager has supported User Acknowledgement, Scheduled, and Immediate maintenance policies. The On Next Reboot policy allows the UCS Manager server administrator to prepare a change that requires a server reboot – such as a firmware update – but not have to do the user acknowledgement and manually trigger the server reboot. Instead, UCS Manager waits until the server OS or Hypervisor reboots. That reboot would be triggered externally, such as by an Operating System administrator during their maintenance activities. When the OS reboots, the UCS changes, such as the firmware update, would take effect. Additional Hardware Support Among the many other things supported in UCS Manager 3.1(1) is support for a lot of additional hardware. This includes support for a number of server accessories including additional GPU and Flash Storage devices. More information is available in the announcement blog on Cisco.com Release Availability UCS Manager 3.1(1e) is now available for download on Cisco.com. Key release information for UCS Manager 3.1(1) includes: UCS Manager 3.1 Release Notes UCS Manager User Guides UCS Manager Release Bundle Contents Finally, if you are at Cisco Live in Berlin, please come by the UCS demo to get more information. ... View more

Improve your UCS Management at scale In December 2015, Cisco released UCS Central Software 1.4 Release. It is available for download on Cisco’s website . There are many enhancements to this release of the manager of UCS Managers. There are 4 key areas of improvements in this release. They include: • Enhancements to the HTML 5 User Interface, including making it the default user interface • Support for new hardware including the UCS 6332 Fabric Interconnects • Support for Cisco Smart Licensing including a per server licensing model • Many policy enhancements including centralized configuration of Fabric Interconnects and support for many additional policies. All of this can be done while managing 10,000 UCS servers from a single IP address, giving you policy-based management at scale. As always, additional details on the features and other release details are available in the UCS Central 1.4 Release Notes . These enhancements provide customers with an enhanced user experience that was designed to better manage large numbers of servers at scale. It also supports the latest hardware options and UCS Fabric Interconnects allowing customers to get the highest levels of performance from their environment. HTML5 User Interface Improvements UCS Central 1.3 introduced a new search and task based interface. We had plans to continuing development beyond that first release and also got great customer feedback for additional enhancements and improvements that were implemented in UCS Central 1.4. The result is that the HTML 5 User interface is now the default interface for UCS Central. The older Flash-based user interface is still available, but is being deprecated and did not get any of the new features introduced into UCS Central 1.4. Enhancements and new features in the UCS Central 1.4 HTML 5 User Interface include: Support for vNIC and vHBA templates in addition to LAN Connection Policies and SAN connection policies, a significant restriction in the HTML 5 interface in UCS Central 1.3. • Many new and improved dashboard widgets including a new Getting Started widget and a new Inventory Status widget • A KVM Unified Launcher and a KVM User role • Improved Table Export capabilities • Improved management of multiple vLAN permissions • Visibility of UCS Manager FSM information in the UCS Central interface • And much more. With the enhancements to the user interface, it will make it easier for both existing and new users to manage their UCS multi-domain environments at scale. New Hardware Support UCS Central 1.4 was pre-enabled to support UCS Manager 3.1(1) , release in January 2016. That includes support for the new Third Generation Fabric Interconnect infrastructure including UCS 6332 Fabric Interconnects , 2304 IO Modules , additional VIC adaptors, and more. This allows user to support the latest enhancements to get the highest levels of performance in their environment, enabling additional workloads. Cisco Smart Licensing Since UCS Central 1.1, UCS Central has been licensed on a per UCS domain basis. Starting in UCS Central 1.4, customers have the option to license UCS Central 1.4 through either a per domain license or through per server licensing using Cisco Smart Licensing. For customers who want to move to per server licensing, there is a method to convert your per domain licenses to per server licenses through the Cisco Smart Licensing portal. This allows customers to select the optimal licensing model for their environment. Policy and Configuration Enhancements The fourth major area of improvements in UCS Central 1.4 is around policy and configuration enhancements. This includes the ability to configure Fabric Interconnect ports and related policies from UCS Central 1.4. In addition, there is support for many additional policies including policies such as equipment tab policies, adapter policies, advanced host firmware packs, vNIC policies, PVLAN, and improved storage profile support. Finally, there are a number of new features to address customer requests. These include Smart Call Home support, SNMP alerts, RADIUS and TACACS support, direct attach storage support, and pre-enabled support for the UCS 6332 Fabric Interconnects. This allows customers who use any of these features in UCS Manager to fully transition to UCS Central in a multi-domain environment. While this is a great summary of the new features in UCS Central 1.4, there is a lot more features and details of those features. One of the great places to check out additional features is the UCS Central 1.4 Release Notes. UCS Central 1.4 Release Availability The release is now available for download on Cisco.com . For existing customers, upgrades are simple. Download the ISO format, reboot the UCS Central virtual machine with the downloaded ISO image, select upgrade, and a few minutes later, the upgrade is finished. Finally, if you want to learn more about UCS Central, you can find great UCS Central labs on Cisco’s dCloud environment . We think that UCS Central 1.4 is a great release for existing UCS Central customers as well as for customers who are looking to add multi-domain management to their existing UCS environment. Finally, if you are Cisco Live in Berlin during February, please come by the Cisco booth to get more details on UCS. ... View more

Yesterday afternoon, we released UCS Central 1.3.  It is available for download on Cisco.com. In addition, we covered it in a lot of detail in a recent UCS Management Tech Talk available at UCS Tech Talk: What’s new in the world of UCS Central version 1.3(1). With the release of UCS Central 1.3, there were three major areas of the product that were addressed. They include support for UCS M-Series modular servers, a new UCS Central front end including a completely re-worked HTML 5 user interface, and support for several additional features. First, UCS M-Series Modular Servers are a new modular server available from Cisco. At a high level, this is a new chassis that supports 8 cartridges. Each cartridge currently has 2 independent Intel Xeon E3 servers for a total of 16 servers in the 2U chassis. The chassis provides shared power, network connections, and hard drives to the 16 servers. From a management perspective, the M-Series servers are managed using UCS Manager 2.5(1) MS with similar features as UCS B-Series and managed C-Series servers. With UCS Central 1.3, UCS Central supports managing UCS M-Series through UCS Manager 2.5(1) MS along with B-Series, managed C-Series, and UCS Mini environments with different versions of UCS Manager. The second area of UCS Central that was addressed was the whole user experience and user interface. Over the years, we have gotten a lot of useful feedback that we have started incorporating in this new user interface. First, based on requests to stop using Flash (or Java), the new UCS Central 1.3 user interface is based on HTML 5. This makes it much easier to support on web browsers from multiple platforms. While this release makes progress on moving things to HTML 5, it should be noted that KVM sessions still require a Java Runtime Environment on the local system. UCS Manager's user interface was designed to scale to several hundred servers. We have received a lot of customer and internal feedback that while UCS Central was easy to learn if you were already familiar with UCS Manager (and gave you a single IP address to manage servers, network, and storage for thousands of servers) it didn't work as well in large scale environments where you had to scroll through lists of thousands of systems to find the one you were looking for. We have reworked the interface to be primarily search and task based. While this will require a learning curve in the new interface, we believe that the improved search, filter, and task interfaces will greatly enhance the user experience. Customers have also asked us to provide more personalized information. We have done this through a new personalized user dashboard where users can pin relevant information to quickly and easily see their summary at a glance. For instance, someone who wants to monitor IDs can pin the ID universe to their dashboard and have an at a glance summary of the usage of all types of IDs across the complete managed environment. They can then click on the expand button to get a more detailed view. While just about every object can be pinned to the user dashboard, not all objects have a summary view yet and we will be working on completing more of them in future releases. One of the strengths of UCS Manager and UCS Central is that there are a lot of options that can be set and managed through policies and settings in software. Unfortunately, there are times where there are multiple ways to do the same task or change the same setting. It definitely hasn't been the simplest product to manage with all of the options and settings. In UCS Central 1.3's new user interface, we have spent a lot of time collecting customer feedback and streamlining and simplifying workflows.  For instance, while there were multiple ways to create Global Service Profiles in the past, in the first version of the UCS Central 1.3 HTML 5 user interface you can only create it from a Global Service Profile Template. We will evaluate the feedback we receive on the current workflows to further enhance and expand them in the future. It should be noted that while UCS Central 1.3 does have a new HTML 5 User Interface, the existing Flash-based user interface is still available in the product and is in fact the default interface at this time. We expect to have both interfaces available for several releases to allow customers to transition between them at their own pace. Finally, there are a number of functional enhancements to UCS Central 1.3. Many of these were based on customer requests and feedback as well as improving the infrastructure of UCS Central. They include support for: Scriptable vMedia which allows customers to point to a remote ISO image for boot through a Global Service Profile instead of having to open a KVM session after the Service Profile is deployed and then link to a remote image. Support for the KVM Hypervisor in addition to VMware and Hyper-V support. Scheduled back up times for both UCS Central as well as the managed UCS domains to provide flexibility in backup windows. Support for using Domain Specific ID pools within Global Service Profiles in addition to the previous support through Local Service Profiles. For UCS Central high availability environments, UCS Central 1.3 supports Network File Share (NFS) for the shared storage in addition to the previously supported RDM. The ability to manually push global VLANs and VSANs to UCS Manager without having to deploy a Global Service Profile to improve the centralized VLAN and VSAN management. While UCS Central has been architected to support 10,000 individual servers, scale testing is an on going process. In UCS Central 1.3, we are happy to report a 50% increase in the number of tested servers from 4000 to 6000 and the number of supported UCS Manager domains doubled, going from 100 domains to 200 domains. This meets the requirements of all but a couple of the largest UCS Central customers at this time. The release is now available for download on Cisco.com. For existing customers, upgrades are simple. Download the ISO image, reboot the UCS Central virtual machine with the downloaded ISO image, select upgrade, and a few minutes later, the upgrade is finished. For anyone interested in deploying UCS Central, we highly recommend the UCS Central Best Practices guide available at UCS Central Best Practice Guide --- Updated for Release 1.3(1a). We are hoping to have the guide updated to cover UCS Central 1.3, including the new HTML 5 user interface, in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, Jacob Van Ewyk UCS Management Product Manager ... View more

Late last week, UCS Manager 3.0(2) for UCS Mini was released on Cisco.com. I am pleased to announce that this release has a number of key enhancements for the UCS Mini platform. The first major enhancement is in server platform support. UCS Manager 3.0(1) supported the B200 M3 blade server as well as the C220 M3 and the C240 M3 rack mount servers. This release adds support for the B200 M4, B420 M3, and B22 M3 blade servers as well as the C220 M4 and C240 M4 rack mount servers. The second major area of enhancement are additional features for UCS Manager running on UCS Mini. These include: Support for Fibre Channel NPV mode Support for Ethernet Switch mode Power Capping enhancements to better track and manage power consumption The ability to update Power Supply Firmware on the Dual Voltage power supplies Support for GPU cards in UCS Mini connected C-Series servers Support for Fusion I/O cards for both blade servers and rack-mount servers connected to UCS Mini Support for 3rd party CNA, NIC, and HBA adaptors for C-Series servers when they are connected to UCS Mini using a VIC card LR transceiver support for 100m cables Features from UCS Manager 2.2(2) and 2.2(3) including: eNIC driver enhancements Tunable fNIC Scriptable vMedia Call Home Enhancements SCVMM R2 support for VMFEX Netflow As with UCS Manager 3.0(1), there are some UCS Manager features that are not supported in UCS Manager 3.0(2) at this time, including USNIC, VXLAN, and NVGRE. These details are highlighted in the UCS Manager 3.0 release notes available on Cisco.com. The third significant change in UCS Manager 3.0(2) is a new HTML 5 based GUI. I have definitely heard of the challenges of using Java Runtime Environments from many customers. This is a major step in improving this experience for our customers. The look and feel of the HTML 5 GUI is substantially similar to the current Java-based GUI so that there will be a minimal learning curve for existing customers. To also facilitate a smooth transition for customers, the HTML 5 GUI will be available along with the Java-based GUI for multiple releases. While this HTML 5 GUI is available for UCS Mini today, we are looking forward to bringing it to classic UCS in the future. Finally, I should note that launching a KVM instance does still require a Java Runtime Environment version 1.6 or higher. While UCS Manager 3.0(2) is a platform specific release for UCS Mini, it should be noted that multiple instances and different versions of UCS Manager can be managed through UCS Central 1.2 and newer. UCS Central works with all versions of UCS Manager starting with UCS Manager 2.1(2) and newer where they are running on classic UCS Fabric Interconnects or the new UCS Mini 6324 Fabric Interconnect. We believe that this release for UCS Mini will provide a lot of additional product and feature support for UCS Mini customers and provide a preview of a new HTML 5 GUI that will be more broadly rolled out in the future. ... View more