The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.
One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.
After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better ;-). I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).
Keyfeatures
- Web based front-end
- KVM and Virtual media
- Change BIOS Settings
- Active Directory connector
- SNMP
- IPMI (Very interesting with the Bare-metal deployment in SCVMM 2012)
- SSH
- Health Monitoring
CIMC is not for “free”, it’s mandatory and included in the price you pay for the server. HP iLO is also mandatory but if you want all the bells and whistles you need to purchase a license. And then we have Dell which gives you the option to purchase different DRAC upgrades to the builtin BMC but neither require any licenses whatsoever.
Dell DRAC and CIMC has a pretty much certainly some of the same hardware since the Virtual KVM & Media application is pretty much identical.