cisco ucs – AgileOps

Reset Admin password for Cisco UCS Director

Ibrahim Quraishi — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:57:57 +0000

Hi All,

In this post i am going to take you through the process of resting the admin password of UCS Director.

As you might be aware that UCS director is a CentOS based appliance and the process to rest the root or the admin password is a bit different then other CentOS based server as this is highly customized appliance by Cisco.

Step1

To login to the ssh shell we have to use the user ‘shelladmin’ the default password set by Cisco is ‘changeme’ on you first login you will be required to change this.

Reenter the new password

Step2

You will be then presented with a menu. you need to press option 22 to change or reset the root password.

22) Manage Root Access

Type 22 as shown in the screen below

SELECT> 22

You can notice that a simple password was not accepted so i had to give a complex password. create one with letters numbers and special case.

Step3

Then login to the shell as root and run the scrip in the location.
/opt/infra/dbPwdReset.sh

As you can see below the option to specify admin password is not give as the password will be rest to the default password which is ‘changeme’

Then you can login to the UCS Director UI as admin and change the password from ‘changeme’ to your desired password. Make sure you keep this password safe or remember it for the next time you login.

Once the password is change you will be logout, you will need to reenter the password to login again to mange the UCS Director

More information about Cisco UCS Director can be found on the links below

Getting Started guide

httpss://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-director/getting-started-guide/6-5/cisco-ucs-director-getting-started-65.html

Overview of Cisco UCS Director
httpss://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-director/fundamentals-guide/5-4/b_UCS_Director_Fundamentals_Guide_54/Overview.pdf

References:

httpss://www.cisco.com/c/pt_br/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-director/index.html

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Cisco UCS Invicta Storage – How to Provision a LUN to ESX Host

Ibrahim Quraishi — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:00:17 +0000

Note:

Create a default LUN and add MAP ID 0 ‘zero’ when ever you are provisioning a new ESX rule of thumb for Invicta is add a default lun lun0_ default with MAP ID 0
Keep all the LUN’s with the same MAP id on each host when provisioning them. ( Caution : If you do not give the same MAP ID for a LUN which is already provisioned and the lun has VM running. The LUN comes up as a new lun to be added to VMware so the Administrator if he is not aware of this issue may end up formating it assuming its a new LUN to provision using VMFS 5.
You need to remember that you can right click and drag and drop luns to map them.

In our environment I have created a default lun with 10 GB and never provision this on VMware, however always add this default lun first with MAP ID 0 to any ESX host you want to provision. Login to the invicta with admin or superuser account.

Step 1: Creating a LUN

Click on LUN Configuration and LUNs and Click on Create LUN

As I have mentioned in the Notes at the top that we need to first create a default lun which is what I am creating below. just fill in the details I call it lun0_default

The size of this lun can even be 1 GB as you are not going to use this lun . I have put 10 GB a I have 65 TB of thin provisioned disk and I am not going to provision this lun its just what is recommended by Cisco documentation to have a default lun 0 provisioned on each host with MAP ID 0 I have created another LUN of 1 TB calling it lun1 as shown below

Step 2. Adding a Host Initiator Group

Click on LUN Configuration and Initiator Groups and Click on Create New Group

Give the server name or if you have 10 esx host to provision the full storage you can call the group and add all the iqn numbers there. – click on Create Group

After the group is created you will find it as shown below, you can right click and see the options you can perform. We need to Add Initiator to this group. In this case I am going to add only one esx host. Copy the iqn number of from the esx host and add it.

To get the IQN if you are using the iSCSI initiator you can go to the host Click on Configuration tab and click on Storage Aadapters and right click and create iscsi adapter. Copy the IQN number.

You will also need to add the iSCSI target ( Invicta iSCSI target) in the Dynamic Discovery tab

Once you get the IQN number copy the IQN number and past it in the WWPN/IQN field below and then you should be ready to provision LUNS.

It will look like this

Step 3: Provisioning LUNS to the ESX Host

To map a LUN right click the esx-01 Initiator Group you have just added and select the second option Map/Unmap Luns

This will take you to a next screen where you will see Avalable LUNs to be added at the bottom and provisioned luns on the top as shown below:

As I have mentioned in the Note that we can drag and drop luns you can select lun0_default and prop it on the top space to provision it. At this point it will automatically assign the lun0_defualt lun the MAP ID 0 . Click Create

Always add the default lun in my example lun0_default first to every esx host or Initiator Group and give it MAP ID 0, remember this is recommended by Cisco. After adding this you can go ahead and add any number of map id however remember to keep the MAP id unique for each lun to avoid problems with lun coming up as unformatted. So this is how you will find after provisioning both the luns keep in mind to have the same lun number and map id number to keep it simple as shown below:

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advanced boot or secure boot configuration cannot be applied to the specified server There are not enough resources overall

Ibrahim Quraishi — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 09:59:21 +0000

Failure Reason: advanced boot or secure boot configuration cannot be applied to the specified server There are not enough resources overall, You might have come across this error. Although the above error looks like a very generic error when you apply a service profile to a Server. Most of the on-line search takes you in the direction of making sure you are using the legacy CD ROM drive. With the process of elimination I found that while using the Flex Flash ‘SD Card’ in Boot Option this error was trigged. once I removed the SD Card, I was able to apply the profile with out any problems. But I wanted to use the Flex Flash with RAID-1,( SD Cards) to boot. more info on Cisco UCS FlexFlash Configuration of Secure Digital (SD) Card As you might be aware that boot from SD card is a new feature introduced in version 2.2 , we then started looking at he version of UCS Manager and Firmware running on the environment. I had recently upgraded this UCS to the 2.2(1d) so that was not an issue. We thought to double check the firmware configuration, when going through this options we create a Host Firmware Policy specifically only for M3 and just selecting the M 200 M3 CIMC and Bios with the latest version of firmware. more info on firmware can be found CISCO UCS Firmware Update Process Once this option was applied to the Service profile The blade started to boot up. The only thing different to this was I had created a custom firmware on Host Firmware Policy called 2.2 firmware but ended up selected quite a lot of servers with latest version of software .. However in my UCS Environment I have only got M 200 M3. So to fix this issue, make sure in ‘Host Firmware Package’ make sure you have customized firmware profile for every different server you have, so that you can individually apply it to the service profile you are assign to that specific server. Example M2 and M3 Blades we can have two Host Firmware Packages which you can add to specific Service profiles individually. Additional resources: If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link CISCO UCS Firmware Update Process If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link Cisco UCS FlexFlash Configuration of Secure Digital (SD) Card ]]>

Cisco UCS FlexFlash Configuration of Secure Digital (SD) Card

Ibrahim Quraishi — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 19:32:54 +0000

Cisco UCS FlexFlash /SDCard Configuration for Booting Server Operating System. As most of the Cisco UCS users might be aware that Cisco has now add a lot of improvements and new features on the latest upgrade 2.2(1e). One of the feature which we have started using is Cisco FlexFlash which is an SD Card. Its fully support if you buy the SD Card from Cisco and we can even do mirroring on the Flash cards for redundancy, we will be installing ESXi Server 5.5 on these blades after mirroring them. So where and How to install the Secure Digital (SD) Card ? If the CISCO UCS B200 Blade is in the Chassis you will need to power it off and slide it out just half way through and you should find the SD Card slot on the left for more information on how about this can be found on the following link https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/hw/blade-servers/B200M3.html As you might be aware that CISCO UCS blade is just as equal to a brick and all the configuration is done on the logical server called Service profile. you will need to create a new / clone an existing Service profile template and modify with the below changes which I have shown below on this post. You will have to create a boot policy with CD Drive (legacy ) and SD Card and Some time you may end up getting this error ‘ advanced boot or secure boot configuration cannot be applied to the specified server There are not enough resources overall ‘ if you see it follow my blog post. I have to make you aware that if you want to use SD card with Mirroring or RAID 1 you have to create the following new policies and create a Boot policy as mentioned above. 1. Disk policy with Mirror and any configuration 2. We have to create two Scrub policy under policy ( you can call it any thing you want which makes you understand what configuration you have selected)

Flex Flash Scrub
No Scrub

So where will you find the Flex Flash Controller? Click on the Left pan on Equipment and Select the Chassis then the Server, on the right you will find the below details click on Inventory and select the last tab which is Storage on the Storage tab you will find FlexFlash Controller Note: this FlexFlash is only support if you are running 2.2 (d1) firmware. Once you assign the new service profile policy, we will see the below error on the FlexFlaash Cards

Go to the service Profile and select the Policies and change the Scrub policy
in this create 2 policy the default is no scrub but you can create one called FlexFlash Scrub and the other one No Scrub

To create the scrub policy click on Service profile of the server and click Policy > Scrub and click Create Scrub Policy

You will have to use the first policy for Flex flash Scrub which should have the below settings.

FlexFlash Scrub: should set to Yes

You then need to create a new policy for No-Scrub as shown below :

After creating two policy this is the tricky bit to have the SD card as Mirror you will need to do two reboots first set the scrub policy to FlexFlash-Scrub ( note this will scrub the SD cards) and click Save Do the following steps:

Go to the server and Click server Maintenance this will scrub the flash
Reboot the server in the following manor, go the the Equipment tab select the Chassis and the server Click on ‘Server Maintenance’ and click on ‘Re-acknowledge’ server

Acknowledge for Reboot You will find the rediscovery Once its configured go back to service profile Go to > Polices Select Scrub Policy and change it to No-Scrub from the drop down menue which should look like below: 5. Go to the server and Click server Maintenance this will Mirror and pair the SD card to Raid1/ Mirroring 6. Reboot the server in the following manor, go the the Equipment tab select the Chassis and the server Click on ‘Server Maintenance’ and click on ‘Re-acknowledge’ server Acknowledge for Reboot After the server does the rediscovery and boots successfully, You will see that this is successfully paired with is RAID 1 Mirroring. Please note the Raid Status : Enabled Paired Error message if the Raid is not working, this means you have to go through the process again. always make sure you only change the scrub policy on the specific server profile and not the service profile template as this will create problems on the working profiles. Another example of error is Raid Status Disabled How to test ? The only confirmation we can get is on the below image where it says Raid Status Enabled Paired, however I have tested swapping the SD cards out one by one and the ESXi Server boots successfully you will immediately see the error message that the pair is disabled. Unfortunately you will need to pull the server out to change swap the SD cards but hay at least you will find out if the mirroring is working. Also you will need to remember that after installing ESXi on SD card will give you an error message on the ESXi host that ‘The ESXi host does not have persistent storage’ you will need to add the storage and a scrach partition. To create a scrach partition follow the below VMware KB. https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1033696 o~~r I might create a blog on how to do it later…~~ My friend Vikram has just posted the process on his blog www.viktec.com System logs on host are stored on non-persistent storage Please find the new updates the latest firmware is bringing. Release 2.2(1b) adds support for the following: IPv6 Management Support Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) In-band Management Fabric scaling: VLAN, VIFs, IGMP, Network Adapter Endpoints Uni-Directional Link Detection (UDLD) Support User Space NIC (usNIC) for Low Latency Support for Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) C-Series Servers Direct Connect to FI without FEX Two-factor Authentication for UCS Manager Logins VM-FEX for Hyper-V Management with Microsoft SCVMM Direct KVM Access Server Firmware Auto Sync Enhanced Local Storage Management Flash Adapters and HDD Firmware Management Precision Boot Order Control Secure Boot UEFI Boot Support FlexFlash (Local SD card) Support Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Inventory DIMM Blacklisting and Correctable Error Reporting C-Series Board Controller Firmware Management Additional resources related to this post: If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link CISCO UCS Firmware Update Process If you want to learn more about the process of doing a Firmware update please checkout my link advanced boot or secure boot configuration cannot be applied to the specified server There are not enough resources overall