I have been working on this concept for a couple of months off and on in my spare time. The thought process was to create a script that performs the manual processes required to deploy an ESX (or Windows) server using Cisco UCS blades. This includes everything from generating the Service Profile to Storage Configuration to Installing the OS. Just like in my Part 1 post below are the script steps.
Script Steps:
1. Generate Server from Cisco UCS Service Profile
2. Gather WWNN, WWPN, and MAC of eth0 (eth0 is my 3rd boot option under boot policy)
3. Generate zoning configuration/push to MDS 9509
4. Create boot LUN
5. Create storage group
6. Create initiator record for new server on the boot hba/fabric (in my case its Fabric B)
7. Add initiator/server to storage group
8. Add boot LUN to storage group
9. Generate pxelinux.cfg and kickstart files
10. Boot Service Profile/Initiate PXE install
I am happy to say I have successfully completed all steps in the above process. Below is a high level breakdown of what the script is doing. I believe I have broken down the script process within each section well enough for you to understand what is happening, if not let me know and I will be happy to describe it in more detail. At the end I have a video of the process in action. Please note I did this more to see if it was possible, so in order to make this script perform multiple installs at the same time you will need to make some modifications, but it does work for a single deploy. You can download the Server Build Script by clicking here. You can download the bundle of scripts by clicking here.
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Ever wonder if your memory is running at 1066MHz or 1333MHz? If it is running at 1066MHz have you wondered if it CAN run at 1333MHz? I had this situation happen to me with the following configuration:
1 x B200M2
8 x 4GB 1333MHz Memory Modules
2 x Intel Xeon® X5650’s
When I went to my servers Inventory/Memory tab this is what I saw:
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I was going to wait to post this script until it was 100% complete, but I realized that it might help people as is. I will continue to update this post (or make new ones) as I add the other sections to this script. Below is the final script algorithm I am going to implement.
Script Steps:
1. Generate Server from Cisco UCS Service Profile
2. Gather WWNN, WWPN, and MAC of eth0
3. Generate zoning configuration/push to MDS 9509
4. Create boot LUN
5. Create storage group
6. Create initiator record for new server on boot hba/fabric
7. Add initiator/server to storage group
8. Add boot LUN to storage group
9. Generate pxelinux.cfg and kickstart files
10. Boot Service Profile/Initiate PXE install
So now you kind of understand the process here is the pudding. Below this script generates the service profile from the service template and then generates the zoning configuration and puts it into text files.
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Recently my cohort and I have implemented a new Cisco UCS system. The system consists of dual chassis and multiple B200 M2 blade servers. As we were going through the initial install I noticed something that Cisco had left out….a scheduling engine for UCS Backups. Since I didn’t want to rely on manually backing the system up on a regular basis I decided to tackle this head on. Below is that journey..
Need to Know:
1. The Cisco UCS backup jobs are named the hostname you enter as the backup target.
2. This script does have a hard-coded Cisco UCS username/password (I’m working on figuring out if I can pass the logged in credential to Cisco UCS)
3. I use an SCP server (Linux box) as the target, but this could be adapted using FTP or the other transfer protocols the UCS allows.
4. 4 backup types exist within Cisco UCS, you can run all of them or choose one. To see the different backup types click here.
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