My first experience with Cisco UCS C210 M2

General stuffs 2 Minutes

Cisco UCS C210 M2 is a server sold by Cisco for its unified computing series of products. Inside the server contains a customized firmware known as Cisco Integrated Management Controller. This CIMC is for managing server resources only, it does not contain other application components such as Voice (CUCM). At first look I thought the server come pre-installed with an OS however a CD provided with the package actually has choices of OS to be chosen: Windows, RHEL and Suse Linux, however these options are to aid OS installation, the Server Conf utility DVD actually does not contain any OS, you need to provide the OS yourself. If you are buying CUCM 8.6, the CUCM is packaged with RedHat Linux.

This is the cisco ucs server front view
This is the Cisco UCS top view
Cisco UCS redundant PSU, the PSU is easily removable.
The console port at the front panel is for the KVM cable provided in the package, alternatively you can use the VGA port and usb ports at the rear of the server. Either you use the console port or use the rear ports not both. The green light is actually the power on/off button. When there is power supplied to the server, the light is amber, you need to push the LED button.
This is invoked when you press CTRL+S. This is to choose the boot method, the server does not come with any OS so it will by default find the OS to boot from the network.
See this splash screen, press F8 to access the CIMC configuration utility.
The options are default. This configuration utility allows user to use browser to access the CIMC webapp to manage Cisco UCS server resources.
From the browser, this is the login screen of CIMC. Default password is username: admin, password: password.
Cisco Integrated Management Controller screen.
Remote presence is enabled by default, this option lets you do configuration remotely instead of sitting in front of the Cisco UCS server.
Click the Launch KVM Console, a Java applet is downloading.
The screen shown in the KVM console java applet is exactly the same you see in front of the monitor if you work at Cisco UCS server.
There are two types of management ports. Dedicated is the single NIC port which is FE. Shared LOM is the pair of NIC ports which is GE. The default CIMC setting is Shared LOM with Active-Active redundancy. This screenshot is to illustrate what is dedicated and shared LOM.

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2 thoughts on “My first experience with Cisco UCS C210 M2”

  1. Thanks for this post. Can you please tell me how i can find if CIMC IP if i have a server which is already running and i cant reboot it. The information you have given above is when the machine boots up. I have one UCS-210 server which has windows 2008 installed on it. Although i can access this OS but i cant figure out the IP of CIMC (and if it is actually enabled or not).

    Please help.

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