UCS

Howto : Hyperflex 1.8 Cluster Expansion

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Expanding Cisco Hyperflex 1.8 Cluster Expanding a Cisco Hyperflex cluster (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) with a Cisco HX Server is very, very easy ! Make sure that you export the JSON file after the Hyperflex installation. This will makes life way easier ! Just use that file, fill in some credentials and wait about 30 minutes. … Read more

Reset passsword UCS Fabric Interconnect

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Password Reset This time I didn’t forget a password. I just got a Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect without any credentials. Here is the procedure to reset it : Connect the console and power on the Fabric Interconnect A. Make sure the Fabric Interconnect B is powered off ! Keep pressing CTRL-l for the loader prompt … Read more

Syncing UCS Director

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UCS Director It’s an automation tool. Not only for Cisco UCS servers, but also for networking, hypervisors and storage. Today I wanted to automate our FlashStack which contains storage of PureStorage with the UCS Director. When configuring UCS Director, I noticed I had to create a WWNN pool at the UCS Manager. After configuring, the UCS … Read more

Top 5 reasons Why Cisco UCS with NVMe.

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Is the NVMe market growing ? According to IDC the NVME market is growing very fast in the next 3 years. SATA and SAS drives (Spinning disk and SSD) will be substantially less in the future. Why is it growing ? All hardware devices for storage relied on SCSI commands. These commands are processed sequential. … Read more

Cisco UCS Director 6.0 with Hyperflex integration (Video)

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Automate Hyperflex with UCS Director 6.0 ! The software is available on the Cisco web site : www.cisco.com/go/software In a short video I will show you a working setup with a HX Cluster and UCS Director 6.0. Not only can you monitor the Hyperflex Cluster, but also configure and automate it with workflows.   Cisco … Read more

Really ? 37 minutes to install Cisco Hyperflex ?

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Configuring the FI / UCS Manager

This week I went to a customer to install Hyperflex HX240 cluster with 4 nodes. Everything was already racked and stacked.

Hyperflex FI configuration
Hyperflex FI configuration

The first step is to configure the FI’s with ip addresses and a password. Just connect a console cable to the FI and your laptop. It’s easier to setup the FI-A and when the setup is finished then power on the FI-B. The procedure to setup a FI-B  is already described at : http://dcccie.joostvandermade.com/?p=25 

 

 

 

 

You should have the correct Firmware for the FI’s. Via the CLI or GUI you can upgrade the FI to the correct firmware. I prefer GUI although via CLI is also very easy. You can find the Dependencies int the Release Notes of Hyperflex

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Solution : Can’t add an EMC VNX 5500 to UCS Director 5.4

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With UCS Director you can easily automate your Data center.

Not only the Cisco devices, but also third party devices like the EMC VNX 5500. But when I tried to add the VNX to the UCS-D system, I received an error and had a problem… Howto fix this. Gladly there is some good documentation after a good search. 😉

Here’s a video I created with the solution.

Howto Add an EMC VNX 5500 to UCS Director 5.4
Watch this video on YouTube.

 

If you don’t like watching a 5 minute video, here is an old fashion blog. 😉

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Simplivity OmniStack installation

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We got a demo unit of Simplivity and some documentation, but unfortunally that documentation isn’t very clear. Maybe the docs at the site are good, but I don’t have access to that. After some time spending with support I created this article just for my own knowledge.

Here are the requirements before doing the steps below :

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Howto Build Your Own Hyper-converged server with FreeNas in 7 steps!

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Hyper-converged systems are hot, but what is it ?

In short : It’s a server where you run VMWare vsphere and you’re using local storage for your NAS/SAN with some better functions than the standard local datastores of VMWare got.

Is it possible to create one for home/SMB purpose ? Well.. I saw the page FreeNas on VMWare ESXi 6.0 and I thought ; Let’s give it a try.

What do you need :

  • a x86 server with lots of memory (for deduplication)
  • Some harddisks.
  • Bootable USD/SDCard
  • Two raid controllers ! One for the disks you want to put in FreeNas. One other harddisk (non-usb or sdcard) for a local datastore for the FreeNas image.
  • VMWare vsphere software
  • FreeNas software.

Howto start :

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