Tag Archives: Server

Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC)

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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

CIMC01

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Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Hardware

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Cisco UCS C200 M2 Hardware

Today my two new virtualization nodes from Cisco arrived. For my Microsoft Hyper-V lab I needed two new nodes and I got a really good offering for two Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Servers.

The whole Cisco server series is optimized for virtualization and offers very cool features like a buildiin Cisco Integrated Management Controller (without extra charge) and Ciscos Extended Memory Technology which allows to use up to 192GB RAM.

Technical Specs

The Cisco UCS C200 M2 server is a high-density, 2-socket, 1 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server built for production-level network infrastructure, web services, and mainstream data center, branch, and remote-office applications.

  • Up to two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 Series multicore processors
  • Up to 192GB of industry-standard double data rate (DDR3) main memory
  • Up to eight 2.5-inch or four 3.5-inch internal SAS or SATA disk drives; up to 8 terabytes (TB) total
  • Built-in RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SATA drives; RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SAS or SATA drives with optional mezzanine card; and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 support for four SAS or SATA drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 support for eight SAS or SATA drives with optional LSI MegaRAID card
  • Two half length Gen 2 PCIe slots-one full height x16 and one low profile x8 PCI Express-two integrated Gb Ethernet ports, and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet management port for accessing the controller
  • Front- and back-panel interface with video, two USB, and serial port connections

More Information on Cisco.com

Hardware

The Hardware makes a really good first impression.

One of my next posts will be about the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) which I really started to like.

Enable SSH on ESXi 5 via vSphere Client

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In the first post I wrote how you can enable SSH on the ESXi 5.0 host. In this post I show you how you can enable or activate SSH on the ESXi 5.0 hosts via the vSphere Client.

  1. First start the vSphere Client
  2. Select the ESXi host in the configurations tab
  3. Select Security Profile
    Enable SSH on ESXi 5.0 vis vSphere Client
  4. Click on Properties in the upper right corner and you will get the a popup with all the services on this ESXi 5.0 hosts. Select the SSH service and press the Options button.
    Enable SSH on ESXi 5.0 vis vSphere Client
  5. Now you can start the services and set the startup options
    Enable SSH on ESXi 5.0 vis vSphere Client
  6. press okay and you are done..

Error: IIS6 Error EventID 1059 and 1021

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Just a had a problem with an application pool which always crashed after start. The application pool worked some days ago without any problems. After watching den System Eventlog I got the Error with Event ID 1059 and a Warning with Event ID 1021.
I had this problem on a Windows Server 2003 SP2 with all the latest patches
EventID 1059
Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1059
Date: 27.05.2011
Time: 11:49:31
User: N/A
Computer: WEB-WIN
Description:
A failure was encountered while launching the process serving application pool 'www.domain.ch'. The application pool has been disabled.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

EventID 1021
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1021
Date: 27.05.2011
Time: 11:50:01
User: N/A
Computer: WEB-WIN
Description:
The identity of application pool, 'www.domain.ch' is invalid. If it remains invalid when the first request for the application pool is processed, the application pool will be disabled. The data field contains the error number.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 2e 05 07 80 ...€

The Solution for this problem is very simple. Just reset the password of the specific IUSR and don’t forget to reset the password for the application pool identity.

How Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS changed our lives

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Cisco UCS Hardware

At the end of last year we had our Cisco UCS ordered and in your datacenter. In January we started the testing and made the Clusters ready for the production environment. In February we started the migration of our existing environment, mostly P2V and also some V2V migrations.

Here some interessting facts about our Cisco UCS and Hyper-V project.

  • We use 12 Cisco UCS Blades this is like 10 HE of rackspace
  • We migrated 45 Windows Servers and 47 Unix Servers in just one week
  • We replace 2 racks of server with a half rack of two Cisco UCS Bladecenters
  • We think we can replace 2-3 racks more with our two Bladecenters.
  • At the end of this year we think we could replace 4-5 racks with 1/2 rack
  • We still have a lot of physical and virtual server which will be needed to be migrated to the Bladecenter.
  • We will get even more out of our Blade Servers by activting Hyper-V Dynamic Memory as a new feature of Hyper-V R2 ServicePack 1

This migration had a lot of positive influence on other things in the datacenter.

Datacenter Power

  • we need now 4% less energie overall
  • we need now 6% less cooling overall
  • we need less space (1 and 1/2 racks at the moment)
  • now our system administrator travel 50% less to the datacenter, because of hardware defects or other administrative tasks.
  • We can deploy new servers in minutes instead of hours

I think all of this numbers (except the time we need to deploy new servers )will increase after the next migrations.

Now I started to write a series of blog posts about installing Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on the Cisco UCS system:

Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS Bladecenter are a powerful team. The UCS Virtual Hardware takes alot of complexety from the hypervisor in your case Hyper-V. You don’t need NIC teaming and stuff like that. Thats is making it very easy to deploy Hyper-V Clusters. And with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager you can save a lot of time in managing your clusters, hosts, virtual machine and also in P2V and V2V migrations. Since Microsoft SCVMM supports Windows Powershell you can also do a lot of scripting automation. And with the release of the new Version of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012) this will even get better for deploying new virtual machines, services and even public and private clouds.

Hyper-V R2 SP1

We started with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Servers before the release of Service Pack 1. We think we can even get a lot more out of your systems with the new Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V which comes in Service Pack 1.

At the end we think choosing the Cisco UCS, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for our datacenter was the best choice we have made, in terms of costs and technology.