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

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

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

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Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Install Blade Servers – Part 3

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After you have created a new Hyper-V 2008 R2 ISO Installation image you can now start to install the Cisco Blade Servers. There are many ways (WDS, Virtual Media) how you can deploy the Hyper-V Image on your Blade Nodes. I will use the Virtual Media to install the Blade Notes in this guide.

Start the KVM Console in the UCS Manager
Attach the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Image to the Virtual Media
Now do the standard Hyper-V installation. With the Image we created Hyper-V will have all the drivers you need.
After the Installation is finished and you set the local administrator password. I change the IP Address of the Server and install the latest updates.