Cisco UCS model to match Dell R900

I am trying to replace existing Dell R900 ( 1 TB of drive space, 24GB RAM and 2 Quad core CPU ) with Cisco UCS but not sure which model I should go with. any response will be appreciated!

It looks like the Dell R900 is a rack server, so if you are looking for something similar, you may want to try the C460-M4:
Specifications at a Glance
Four rack-unit (4RU) chassis
Either 2 or 4 Intel® Xeon® processor E7-4800 v2 or E7-8800 v2 product family CPUs
Up to 6 terabytes (TB)* of double-data-rate 3 (DDR3) memory in 96 dual in-line memory (DIMM) slots
Up to 12 Small Form Factor (SFF) hot-pluggable SAS/SATA/SSD disk drives
10 PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 slots supporting the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards and third-party adapters and GPUs
Two Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports
Two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports
A dedicated out-of-band (OOB) management port
*With 96 x 64 GB DIMMs when available.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c460-m4-rack-server/index.html
I hope this helps.
Let me know if you have questions, if none, please mark the question as answered.
-Kenny

Similar Messages

Cisco UCS 6248 and Dell EQ 6510x

We have a Dell EQ 6510x we have in production and we are about to power on a Cisco UCS B series chassis and a pair of 6248UP FIs. I'm planning to connect the 4 6510x 10G ports directly to the 6248 FIs and set them as Applicance Ports.
My question is would be be better to connect the 6510x Primary controller's two 10G ports directly to FI-A and the standby controller 10G ports directly to FI-B, or stagger them? Stagger meaning Primary Controller one10G to FI-A and one 10G to FI-B then Standby controller one 10G to FI-A and one10G to FI-B. Thanks!

Hello there,
In your design always keep in mind that both UCS FI are separate switches, they always will talk each other by the upstream switch. The best pratice is connect anything that have to talk with UCS domain in the upstream switch.
If there is no option to do so, you can connect through the FIs, using a appliance port. In your case I believe that connect stagger mode is the best option, but I'm not sure, depends how your vnics are configured and if your Dell EQ can do port-channel in active-standby mode.

Windows 2008 R2 on Cisco UCS B200M networking problems

This is driving me completely nuts. Let me start by saying I am new to blade servers and Cisco UCS. I did take an introduction class, and it seemed straight-forward enough. I have a chassis with two B200M blades, on which I am trying to configure two Windows 2008 R2 servers, which I will eventually make Hyper-V servers. This is all in a test environment, so I can do anything I want to on them.
Right now I have installed W2008 directly on hard disks on the B200M hardware.
The problem is this: even though I think I've configured the network hardware correctly, using the Cisco VIC driver software, I cannot get networking to work in any reliable way. I cannot even get ping to work consistantly. I can ping my local server address, but I cannot ping my gateway (HSRP address). When I try, I get a "Reply from 10.100.1.x: Destination host unreachable (x being each particular server's last octet). I CAN, however, ping the individual IP addresses of the core switches. I can also ping some, but not all, the other devices that share the servers' subnet. There are no errors being generated, the arp tables (for those devices I can ping) look good, netstat looks OK. But I cannot get outside the local subnet...
Except when I can.
There are times when I can get all the way out to the Internet, and I can download patches from Microsoft. When it works, it works as expected. But if I reboot the server, oftentimes networking stops working. Yet another reboot can get things going again. This happens even though I've made no changes to either the UCS configs or the OS.
I cannot figure out any reason when it works at some times and not at others. I've made sure I have a native VLAN set, I've tried pinning to specific ports on the Fabric Interconnects. There is just no rhyme or reason to it.
Anyone know of where I can look? I'm very familiar with Windows on stand-alone boxes (although it's no longer my area of expertise), and I manage a global WAN (BGP, OSPF, Nexus 7k, etc.) so I'm no dummy when it comes to networking, but I am utterly stumped on this one.

The problem was this: while the NICs on the blade server are called vNIC0 and vNIC1, Windows was calling vNIC1 "Local Area Connection" and vNIC0 "Local Area Connection 2". So what I configured on UCS did not match what I was configuring in Windows. Completely, utterly ridiculous.
Anyway, networking is working now without any issues. Thanks for you suggestion; it did get me looking in the right direction.

Ethernet controller driver not installing after Windows Server 2008 installation on Cisco UCS blade

I am using MDT 2010 to deploy Windows Server 2008 to a Cisco UCS B200 blade. The OS and hotfixes install with no problem. The system reboots and attempts to connect to the deployment share to continue with the task sequence and I receive an error stating
"A connection to the deployment share could not be made. The following networking device did not have a driver installed. PCI\VEN_1137&DEV_0043&SUBSYS_00481137&REV_A2"
The driver in question is the driver for the Ethernet controller for the UCS blade. More specifically, it is the network driver for the Palo card in the UCS Chassis. When I Ignore or Abort the install, I am able to manually install the driver and restart the
task sequence. The build then completes successfully with no further issue. I just cannot seem to automate the driver install. Has anyone dealt with this type of issue?

Vik and stealthfield - thank you for your responses.
I was preparing a script to manually move the driver into the c:\windows\inf location when I had to stop to create a new task sequence for a different build. It was while building this task sequence that I found the soulution to the problem.
In the Post Install -> Inject Drivers step of the Task Sequence, I noticed that it was executing a command of type "Inject Drivers" with a selection profile of "All Drivers" and "Install only matching drivers
from the selection profile" selected.
I changed this to run a command of type "Run Command Line" and specified that it execute "%Scriptroot%\ZTIdrivers.wsf". I noticed that this was selected in one of my other builds that was working properly, so I thought I'd
give it a try. - IT WORKED.
So to sum up, the solution was to change the type of command being executed in the "Post Install -> Inject Drivers" step of the task sequence. After this change, the machine came up and continued the task sequence with no further issues.
Thanks again for the responses - They were helpful and I do appreciate it.

FCoE options for Cisco UCS and Compellent SAN

Hi,
We have a Dell Compellent SAN storage with iSCSI and FCoE module in pre-production environment.
It is connected to new Cisco UCS infrastructure (5108 Chassis with 2208IOM + B200 M2 Blades + 6248 Fabric Interconnect) via 10G iSCSI module (FCoE module isn't being used at th is moment).
I reviewed compatibility matrix on interconnect but Compellent (Dell) SAN is only supported on FI NXOS 1.3(1), 1.4(1) without using 6248 and 2208 IOM which is what we have. I'm sure some of you have similar hardware configuration as ours and I'd like to see if there's any supportive Cisco FC/FCoE deployment option for the Compellent. We're pretty tight on budget at this moment so purchasing couple of Nexus 5K switches or something equipvalent for such a small number of chassis (only only have one) is not a preferred option. If additional hardware acquisition is inevitable, what would be the most cost effective solution to be able to support FCoE implementation?
Thank you in advance for your help on this.

Unfortunatly there isn't really one - with direct attach storage there is still the requirement that an upstream MDS/N5k pushes the zoning to it. Without a MDS to push the zoning the system it's recommended for production.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2.0/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_0_chapter_0101.html#concept_05717B723C2746E1A9F6AB3A3FFA2C72
Even if you had a MDS/N5K the 6248/2208's wouldn't support the Compellent SAN - see note 9.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/interoperability/matrix/Matrix8.pdf
That's not to say that it won't work, it's just that we haven't tested it and don't know what it will do and thus TAC cannot troubleshoot SAN errors on the UCS.
On the plus side iSCSI if setup correctly can be very solid and can give you a great amount of throughput - just make sure to configure the QoS correctly and if you need more throughput then just add some additional links

Conectar Cisco UCS via Nexus a NFS via IP

Tenemos una solución Cisco UCS la cual esta conectada a los Switches de Agregación Nexus y cuando se trata de conectar un o unos ServidoresVirtuales o SX a un NFS via IP no establece la conexión generando time-out, pero si la solución Cisco UCS es conectada a unos 6500 que se comportan como unas extensiones del Nexus, si se establece la conexión sin problemas.

Si efectivamente tenemos este problema, los UCS conectados a través del Nexus llegan a establecer la conexión a los NFS luego de varios intentos se establece, cuando se hace la consulta de información se vuelve extremadamente lenta , los nexus en nuestra red son los Switches Cabecera de Acceso manejan la capa 3 del Datacenter y se encuentran conectados a ellos 4 Switches 6513 vía vpc como extensiones en capa 2, la conexión de los Fabrics de los UCS conectados tambien via vpc hacia ambos nexus, cuando se tenían conectados los fabrics en los 6500 la conexión hacia los NFS se establecía normalmente, tuvimos que sacar los servidores que requieren este tipo de conexión a unos Blade de IBM que están conectados a los 6500

HDD Firmware mismatch on Cisco UCS.

Hi Experts,
Need advice here. Is there any concern if my HDD firmware on Cisco UCS are mismatched. There reason why we had several Harddisk brand and firmware is because we usually faced with harddisk failure. Hence we RMA the harddisk and replace with new HDD brand and Firmware (See below). We also faced VM is not running well caused we have to re installed the VM on the same server. Is it cause by mismatch HDD?
PPM403-UCS-02 /chassis/storageadapter # show physical-drive
Physical Drive Number Controller Info Valid Status Manufacturer Model Predictive Failure Count Drive Firmware Coerced Size Type
1 SLOT-5 Yes online TOSHIBA MK3001GRRB 0 5702 285148 MB HDD
2 SLOT-5 Yes online TOSHIBA MK3001GRRB 0 5702 285148 MB HDD
3 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD
4 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD
5 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0004 285148 MB HDD
6 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD
7 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD
8 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0004 285148 MB HDD
9 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD
10 SLOT-5 Yes online SEAGATE ST9300653SS 0 0002 285148 MB HDD

Hi
Have you run the latest host update CD to flash the firmware?
If you are having problems generally it would be a good idea.
Aaron

ISCSI- Adding iSCSI SRs to XS booting via iSCSI [Cisco UCS]

Hello all-
I am currently running XS 6.0.2 w/ HF XS602E001 & XS602E002 applied running on Cisco UCS B200-M3 blades. XS seems to be functioning ok, except that i cannot see the subnet assigned to my SAN, and as a result, i cannot add any SR for VM storage.
The subnet and vNIC that i am configuring is also used for the iSCSI boot.
The vNIC is on LAN 2 and is set to Native
The SAN is a LeftHand P4300 connected directly to appliance ports (LAN2) on the Fabrics
Used the following commands during installation to get the installer to see the LUN.
echo "InitiatorName=my.lun.x.x.x" > /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi
/opt/xensource/installer/init --use_ibft
If i missed anything or more info is needed, please let me know.

Thanks Padramas,
I have 2 NICs that show up in XenCenter. Nic A is the vNIC associated with VLAN1 and provide the uplink to the rest of the network. The second NIC in XenCenter matches the MAC of the vNIC used to boot XenServer, so the NIC used for booting the OS is visible in XenCenter.
I have tried many different thing on my own to resolve this issue. I believe i have already tried adding a 3rd vNIC to the service profile for VM iSCSI traffic, but with make another attempt.
When configuring the vNIC for VM iSCSI traffic, do I only need to add the 3rd vNIC, or do i need to create both a vNIC and second iSCSI vNIC with Overlay vNic pointing to newly created (3rd) vNIC? My understanding is that the iSCSI vNICs are only used for booting, but I am not 100% sure.
Thanks again for the help!

Ask the Expert: Cisco UCS B-Series Latest Version New Features

Welcome to this Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn and ask questions about the Cisco UCS Manager 2.2(1) release, which delivers several important features and major enhancements in the fabric, compute, and operational areas. Some of these features include fabric scaling, VLANs, VIFs, IGMP groups, network endpoints, unidirectional link detection (UDLD) support, support for virtual machine queue (VMQ), direct connect C-Series to FI without FEX, direct KVM access, and several other features.
Teclus Dsouza is a customer support engineer from the Server Virtualization team at the Cisco Technical Assistance Center in Bangalore, India. He has over 15 years of total IT experience. He has worked across different technologies and a wide range of data center products. He is an expert in Cisco Nexus 1000V and Cisco UCS products. He has more than 6 years of experience on VMware virtualization products.
Chetan Parik is a customer support engineer from the Server Virtualization team at the Cisco Technical Assistance Center in Bangalore, India. He has seven years of total experience. He has worked on a wide range of Cisco data center products such as Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus 1000V. He also has five years of experience on VMware virtualization products.
Remember to use the rating system to let Teclus and Chetan know if you have received an adequate response.
Because of the volume expected during this event, our experts might not be able to answer every question. Remember that you can continue the conversation in the Data Center community, under subcommunity Unified Computing, shortly after the event. This event lasts through May 9, 2014. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other Cisco Support Community members.

Hi Jackson,
Yes its is possible. Connect the storage array to the fabric interconnects using two 10GB links per storage processor. Connect each SP to both fabric interconnects and configure the ports on the fabric interconnect as “Appliance” ports from UCSM
For more information on how to connect Netapp storage using other protocols like iSCSI or FCOE please check the url below.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-6100-series-fabric-interconnects/whitepaper_c11-702584.html
Regards
Teclus Dsouza

Problem on installing Solaris 10 on Cisco UCS-C24-M3S2 rack server.

I've got issue on installing Solaris 10 on Cisco UCS-C24-M3S2 rack server. Solaris 10 doesn't recognize UCSC-RAID-ROM55.

Hi dipaktimsina,
From the documentation below it looks like Solaris doesn't have support for the embedded raid controller with the ROM55 chip.
http://www.cisco.com/web/techdoc/ucs/interoperability/matrix/matrix.html
let me know if you have any questions and don't forget to rate any useful answers.

Monitoring Cisco UCS Manager via HP System Information Manager 7.1 (SIM)

I am working with a customer to configure HP System Information Manager 7.1 (SIM) to monitor their Cisco UCS Manager.
The customer is looking to monitor the following:
- CPU Utilization on manager, blades, servers, etc...
- Memory utilization
- Network utilization
- System inventory
Alerting is needed for the following:
- Hardware failures: memory, power supply, drive, etc...
- Predictive failures
- Alert messages
I have the list of all the MIBs provided by Cisco but an having the following issues while loading them into HP SIM.
While loading MIB "CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-TC-MIB" I get the following error message:
Line 128: Error defining object: expected a label, found reserved symbol {
Line in MIB: SYNTAX Gauge32 {
Guage32 is imported from SNMPv2-SMI MIB
To get past this error I found a version of the MIB that removes all the textual conventions that where causing errors. I have attached the fixed MIB file to this discussion. With the fixed version of the MIB installed in SIM everything compiles and installs except the following two MIBS. CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-NOTIFS-MIBCISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-CONFORM-MIB Questions:
1. Is there any way to get the CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-TC-MIB MIB to install correctly into HP SIM?
2. Is my MIB load order setup correctly?
3. Has anyone had success getting HP SIM to monitor and alert for Cisco UCS manager?
MIB Load Order:
SNMPv2-SMI
SNMPv2-TC
SNMP-FRAMEWORK-MIB
RFC1213-MIB
IF-MIB
CISCO-SMI
CISCO-ST-TC
ENTITY-MIB
INET-ADDRESS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-TC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FAULT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-NOTIFS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-AAA-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-ADAPTOR-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-BIOS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-BMC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-CALLHOME-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-CAPABILITY-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-COMM-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-COMPUTE-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-CONFORM-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-DCX-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-DHCP-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-DIAG-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-DPSEC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-EPQOS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-EQUIPMENT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-ETHER-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-EVENT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-EXTMGMT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-EXTVMM-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FABRIC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FCPOOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FIRMWARE-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-FLOWCTRL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-HOSTIMG-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-IMGPROV-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-IMGSEC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-IPPOOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-IQNPOOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-ISCSI-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-LICENSE-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-LLDP-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-LSBOOT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-LSMAINT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-LS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-MACPOOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-MAPPINGS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-MEMORY-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-MGMT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-NETWORK-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-NWCTRL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-ORG-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-OS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-PCI-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-PKI-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-PORT-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-POWER-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-PROCESSOR-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-PROC-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-QOSCLASS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-SOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-STATS-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-STORAGE-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-SW-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-SYSDEBUG-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-SYSFILE-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-TOP-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-TRIG-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-UUIDPOOL-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-VM-MIB
CISCO-UNIFIED-COMPUTING-VNIC-MIB
References:
ftp://ftp.cisco.com/pub/mibs/supportlists/ucs/ucs-manager-supportlist.html#_Toc303691433
http://www.hp.com/wwsolutions/misc/hpsim-helpfiles/simsnmp.pdf

Please post "debug ccsip messages".
Based on your debug you are getting "Cause No. 38 - network out of order."
You may want to bind SIP to an interface that the IP address is defined which Lync points to.
Chris

Cisco UCS Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Login Error

I have Cisco UCS 1.4 (3q) and just installed the MP v2.1 for Cisco UCS, however when I click on the "Management Pack Events" alert view in the SCOM console, there are error for event number 19900. The description of the error is as follows:
Description:
CISCO UCS R2 MP (https://10.x.x.x/nuova) [CISCO.UCS.R2.Proxy.LoadCache.ProbeAction.vbs] : CISCO UCS Login Error: Authentication failed (Code: 551)
I noticed that it's looking for the /nuova directory, but in order to login to our UCS environment, we usually just go to the IP address - so I'm wondering if that has something to do with it? I've verified that when going directly to the IP from Internet Explorer I can login using the opsmgr credentials we specifically created for this account. I've also gone through the process of creating a run-as account on the SCOM side and associated it with the correct profiles.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Troubleshooting has found out its user error, wrong password configured.

Cisco UCS with FEX system Component requirements

Hi ,
I am looking for quick suggestion for required components to have a VMware vSAN implemented using FEX system with maximum Fabric trough put. Ideally a configuration for without multipath using single Fabric switch and later on to be able to upgrade to Multipath fabric.
We are in great rush to provide POC concept and was looking if you folks can suggest me on this. If need be you want to talk to me more in detail I can available.
Appreciate your help here.
Who can I reach to able to pull up build and quote the configurations for implementing complete UCS solution.
Are these below components absolutely required ?
2 x Nexus 2232PP 10GE Fabric Extenders
The Cisco Nexus 2232PP 10GE provides 32 x 10Gb loss-less low latency Ethernet and Fiber Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) server ports and eight 10 Gb Ethernet and FCoE SFP+ uplink ports in a compact 1 rack unit (1RU) form factor. They enable Seamless inclusion of UCS rack servers into UCS Manager domain with UCS blade servers when connected to the UCS 6200 Fabric Interconnects, providing converged LAN, SAN, and management connectivity.
We currently have these below servers :
2 x UCSC-BASE-M2-C460
        524 GB RAM
        No SSDs
        No VIC Card
        4 x SAS 1 TB Drives
        1 x L1 Intel 1 Gbps Ethernet Adapter
        1 x L2 10Gbps Ethernet Adapter
        1 x LSI Mega RAID SAS 9240-8i (no RAID 5 support, Need a card that supports RAID5)
1 x UCSC-C240-M3L
        132 GB RAM
        30 TB SAS HDD
        1 x VIC Card
        1 x Intel I350 Gigabit Ethernet Card with 4 ports
        1 x LSI Mega RAID SAS 9240-8i (no RAID 5 support, Need a card that supports RAID5)
1 x 5548UP Nexus Switch ( Will I be able to use this switch in place of Nexus 2232PP 10GE Fabric Extenders to achieve complete UCS solution)

Cisco UCS Manager 2.2 supports an option to connect the C-Series Rack-Mount Server directly to the Fabric Interconnects. You do not need the Fabric Extenders. This option enables Cisco UCS Manager to manage the C-Series Rack-Mount Servers using a single cable for both management traffic and data traffic.
If you need high performance low latency (storage, for VMware VSAN), direct connection to UCS Fabric Interconnect and/or N5k is recommended.

Cisco UCS RAID SAS 2008M-8i Mezzanine Card Performance?

I recently purchased a UCS C220 bundle, which includes a Cisco UCS RAID SAS 2008M-8i Mezzanine Card. I'm planning on deploying this as a standalone server running XenServer 6.2 in the near future.
I'm happy with the unit and testing is good, but for one aspect. The disk IO throughput on it seems to be far short of what I expected. I have a desktop PC with an Intel DZ77GA-70K motherboard as a lab spare, and the disk IO I can achieve from that server with the same disks exceeds what the C220 seems to be able to achieve, on a consistent repeatable basis.
The testing I am doing is based around two benchmarks:
1. A 400G file copy between the two machines, over the network back-to-back to note the maximum sustained throughput, and
2. A mix of runs with 'sysbench' to mix of tests of local IO, of sequential and random reads and writes, with the command: "sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=150G --file-test-mode=seqrd --init-rng=on --max-time=300 --max-requests=0 run"
For #1, I run a copy to/from an HP MicroServer Gen8, which has 12TB of disk space on it in a Linux RAID0 configuration (4x3TB Seagate drives). If I copy files to or from this HP Server to the Intel DZ77GA-70K I am able to easily saturate the 1G network, achieving a sustained 960MBit/s for an hour or more at a time. If I then take the exact same SATA disks from the DZ77GA-70K, connect these into the UCS box and do the exact same network copy with the exact same OS, I'm only about to get around ~400-500MBit/sec of sustained throughput.
For #2, the test results of which are entirely local to the C220, come in around 105-110 MByte/sec on a sequential read, which drops to around 2 MByte/sec on a random read or write test. No surprise of the enormous drop - because random reads/writes are a pretty tough IO load, but I would expect sequential reading should be much better. I can get consistent sysbench seqrd results from the MicroServer of around 300 MByte/sec, for example.
I can consistently replicate this with Redhat 6.5, as well as Gentoo (running the latest linux kernel) as well as from a Xen 6.2SP1 Hypervisor install on the C220 (tested from the Dom0 domain itself, as well as a Linux guest) all 64 bit. Jumbo frames are enabled end-to-end also, and CPU is not bottlenecking. Latest firmware is installed on all components. The ucs-cxxx-drivers.1.5.4a.iso image states that for the Redhat and Xen systems, that the required drivers are included in the OS, so I don't need to worry about installing them separately. Presumably the Gentoo system has even newer drivers again because it has a very new kernel, but alas the throughputs are the same on all of those systems.
I have tried with SATA as well as a SAS drive, and the test results are also practically the same. All disks in all servers are Seagate 6.0 Gb/s units, and none of the servers are swapping to disk at any stage.
I am happy with network IO - I can completely saturate the 1G ports easily, and I'm convinced that's not a part of the problem here.
What could cause this sort of performance? Storage card logs in CIMC don't indicate anything is wrong and none of the OS's are indicating issues of any sort, but it certainly does seem something isn't right in that I'm getting significantly superior performance from a desktop motherboard and the MicroServer, than an enterprise grade server, when testing with the exact same hard drives.
Questions:
- Is the 2008M-8i card considered a low-end RAID card or should I be getting reasonable throughput from it? I was anticipating performance at least as good as a desktop motherboard, but this doesn't seem to be the case. The RAID card as a component is more expensive than an entire MicroServer or Intel Motherboard so it should run much better, yes?
- What sort of performance should I expect out of this card on a single sequential read or write?
- Can this RAID card run drives just as JBOD's or do all disks have to be initialised in an array (even if just a RAID0 array with 1 disk)? It seems if they are added to the server they do not show up to any OS until they are initialised as part of an array, although I haven't delved into the BIOS settings of the card itself (only from CIMC so far).
- I recall seeing something about best practice of having two virtual drives on these cards, what is the impact in running more, given the card certainly allows more to be created (I currently have 4 while I am testing)
- I noticed on Cacti graphs while rebuilding a RAID1 array that the CPU ran hotter while the array was being rebuilt, and cooled down once the rebuild had completed, which indicates the rebuild was using up CPU on the host hardware. Should this not have been entirely transparent to the system if the RAID activity is offloaded to this card, or is an increase in CPU to be expected?
I'm very keen to find out others experiences of this card, what people have done to get good throughput out of it, or if I should go back to a whitebox server with an Intel board :-)
Thanks,
Reuben

Hello Reuben,
I reached out to colleagues who are more knowledge on this topic and here is their response.
- Is the 2008M-8i card considered a low-end RAID card or should I be getting reasonable throughput from it? I was anticipating performance at least as good as a desktop motherboard, but this doesn't seem to be the case. The RAID card as a component is more expensive than an entire MicroServer or Intel Motherboard so it should run much better, yes? -
2008M-8i card is a entry/value card with an expected performance which is better than a software RAID. This card doesn’t utilise memory in a standard RAID 0/1 configuration.
- What sort of performance should I expect out of this card on a single sequential read or write? - We should expect around 1GB sequential read (refer link http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/whitepaper_c11-728200.html)
- Can this RAID card run drives just as JBOD's or do all disks have to be initialised in an array (even if just a RAID0 array with 1 disk)? It seems if they are added to the server they do not show up to any OS until they are initialised as part of an array, although I haven't delved into the BIOS settings of the card itself (only from CIMC so far). -
This card can be used in JBOD mode. To enable JBOD mode you need to use MegaCLI commands. This option is not present as a default configuration.
Please note: Once we enable the JBOD mode – it cannot be reverted back to the default RAID mode setting.
- I recall seeing something about best practice of having two virtual drives on these cards, what is the impact in running more, given the card certainly allows more to be created (I currently have 4 while I am testing) -
This doesn’t apply for this card as it does not have any cache. Can you please point us to the document about best practice of having two virtual drives ?
- I noticed on Cacti graphs while rebuilding a RAID1 array that the CPU ran hotter while the array was being rebuilt, and cooled down once the rebuild had completed, which indicates the rebuild was using up CPU on the host hardware. Should this not have been entirely transparent to the system if the RAID activity is offloaded to this card, or is an increase in CPU to be expected? - Creating/Deleting/Modifying a RAID volume is a CPU independent operation.

Cisco UCS C220-M3 Server doesn't boot after adding Intel I350 Quad Port NIC

Hello,
We have purchased 2 Cisco UCS C220-M3 rack mounted servers (Single Processor) that have a dual port I350 LOM. We also purchased two Intel I350 Quad Port NICs to expand the available ports on each server from 2 to 6.
The problem we are facing is that the server will not complete the boot process unless we disable either the LOM or the Quad Port NIC. We have tried numerous settings in the BIOS area but we haven't managed to have them both working.
The I350 Quad Port NICs are from Intel and not from Cisco and we are running the latest FW/BIOS on the Servers as of March 10 2015.
We have followed the steps described in the installation guide to install them.
Could you provide some light in this situation please, what are our options?
P.S. Although the LOMs are I350, the MAC Address Vendor is Cisco, is it possible that Cisco servers accept only Cisco Branded Expansion Cards?
Thank you,
George

Hi Shawn,
At least I'm not the only one having the same problem!
You are trying to use the cards with the LOMs enabled?
Which screen are you referring to in the first paragraph of your message?
Mine sits in BIOS POST for about 10 minutes and then resets itself....
We are also waiting for an answer from Cisco, so any findings/news will be posted here.
Thanks,
George

Cisco UCS model to match Dell R900

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