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UCS Director – Schedule Database Backup script

I had a problem a while ago where UCS Director crashed during a Metrocluster failover test. It was caused by the delay in the transfer of writable disks on the storage which in turn caused the VM kernel to panic and set the disk to read only. After that problem, and due to other restore issues within the infrastructure as well as not having a backup prior to the failover test I was left with a dead UCS Director appliance. It was essentially completely buggered as the Postgres database had become corrupt. Cisco support were unable to resolve the problem and it took a lot of playing around with NetApp snapshots to pull back a somewhat clean copy of the appliance from before the failover test. Really messy and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Since then I’ve been capturing weekly backups of the UCS Director database to a FTP server so I have a copy of the DB to restore should there be any problems with the appliance again. This script is not supported by Cisco so please be aware of that before implementing it. To set up the backup create a DB_BACKUP file in /usr/local/etc with the following:

#!/bin/sh
# server login password localfile remote-dir
upload_script(){
 echo "verbose"
 echo "open $1"
 sleep 2
 echo "user $2 $3"
 sleep 3
 shift 3
 echo "bin"
 echo $*
 sleep 10
 echo quit
}
 
doftpput(){
 upload_script $1 $2 $3 put $4 $5 | /usr/bin/ftp -i -n -p
}
 
/opt/infra/stopInfraAll.sh
/opt/infra/dbBackupRestore.sh backup
BKFILE=/tmp/database_backup.tar.gz
if [ ! -f $BKFILE ]
then
echo "Backup failed. "
return 1
fi
export NEWFILE="cuic_backup_`date '+%m-%d-%Y-%H-%M-%S'`.tar.gz"
export FTPSERVER=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
export FTPLOGIN=< ftp user name >
export FTPPASS=<ftp password>
doftpput $FTPSERVER $FTPLOGIN $FTPPASS $BKFILE $NEWFILE
nohup /opt/infra/startInfraAll.sh &
 
exit 0

Next you’ll need to edit your cron jobs on the appliance. You can use the crontab -e  command to edit the schedule settings and enter:

1 2 * * 0 /usr/local/etc/DB_BACKUP > /dev/null 2>&1

 

And there you go, you now have a weekly scheduled backup of your UCS Director database.

 DB backup pathc

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UCS Director – BareMetal Agent Installation Version 5.2, Upgrade to 5.3

UCS Director Baremetal Agent Installation:

Before commencing the Installation of the Baremetal Agent appliance I would recommend that UCS Director has been fully installed and is available before proceeding. If you need to install UCS Director as an initial installation there’s some great documentation on the Cisco site but you can also check out the blog post by Jeremy Waldrop. It’s for an older version of UCS Director but the installation steps still count for the current version. If you are upgrading from a previous version of UCS Director then you can check out a previous post I did on upgrading UCS Director from 5.1 to 5.3.

Useful Documents:

Cisco UCS Director Baremetal Agent Installation and Configuration Guide, Release 5.2

Cisco UCS Director Baremetal Agent Installation and Configuration Guide, Release 5.3

Download Software:

Go to Cisco Download for UCS Director  and select first UCS Director 5.3. Download the Cisco UCS Director Baremetal Agent Patch 5.3.0.0

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade Download Accept the license agreement

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade Download license agreement

The download will begin

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade Downloaded File

Next, go back to the main UCS Director download page and select UCS Director 5.2.

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade OVF DeploymentAccept the license agreement

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade license agreement

The download will begin

UCSD Bare Metal Upgrade Patch Download File

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UCS Director – Upgrade Version 5.1 to 5.3

Cisco have recently release a new version of their orchestration product UCS Director. The new release is version 5.3 and includes a raft of new features of which the majority are around improved reports and APIC support. Another new feature update is the support for NetApp OnTap 8.3. My primary reason for performing the upgrade is to leverage the reports and enhancements to workflow execution. It’s also been almost a year since the 5.1 installation was performed and I want to keep my systems up to date as much as possible. I’m currently running UCS Director 5.1.0 and Baremetal Agent 5.0.

Some of the new features in UCSD 5.3 are:

  • Support for C880 M4 Server
  • Support for Versa Stack and IBM Storwize
  • Enhancements to EMC RecoverPoint
  • Enhancements to VMware vSphere Support (VSAN Support)
  • Enhancements to Application Controllers (Cisco APIC)
  • Enhancements to workflow execution
  • Enhancements to the script module
  • Enhancements to UCSD REST APIs
  • Enhancements to Managing NetApp Accounts (including support for OnTap 8.3)
  • Enhancements to Cost Models and Chargeback features
  • Changes to Report APIs

You can find more about the features in the release over on the Cisco UCS Director 5.3 Release Notes site.

There are two components to the release, UCS Director itself and the Baremetal Agent upgrade. The supported upgrade paths for both components are:

Cisco UCS Director

Current Release Direct Upgrade Supported Upgrade Path
Release 4.0.x.x No 4.0 > 4.1 > 5.1 > 5.3
Release 4.1.x.x No 4.1 > 5.1 > 5.3
Release 5.0.x.x No 5.0 > 5.1 or 5.2 > 5.3
Release 5.1.x.x Yes 5.1 > 5.3
Release 5.2.x.x Yes 5.2 > 5.3

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Leap Second Year – Impact on Cisco Equipment

Our network engineer sent out an email last week about a potential bug due to this year being a Leap Second Year. This wasn’t something I was aware of before so I did a bit of a search for not only the impact of the bug and what exactly a Leap Second is. As it turns out due to rotational variations of the planet the atomic clock can be out of sync. When this gets to 0.9 second the International Earth Rotation and Reference System (IERS) announces that a leap second will be added to the clock.

On midnight on June 30 this year the world atomic clock will have one second added to align the atomic clock to variances in the earths rotation. This is not the first occurance of this, there’s been 26 of these additional seconds added to the atomic clock since 1972. The last of these changes was in 2012. So what’s the big deal? Well, since the vast majority of computer systems use NTP to lock in their time settings the additional second will cause the same second to occur twice and this has the potential to cause some damage or downtime due to reboots. In 2012 some high profile companies such as Qantas, LinkedIn and Yelp suffered from outages as their equipment rebooted as it wasn’t able to handle the leap second. Cisco has worked to put both software/firmware updates or workarounds in place to help their customers resolve any potential impact. You can find more information about the Leap Second over on Cisco’s site.

As soon as I read the email I began to check out which systems are affected by this problem. The focus was obviously on the Cisco equipment within our Flexpod environment. This includes Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000, UCS Manager, UCS Fabric Interconnects, Cisco MDS switches and lastly Cisco UCM sitting on the infrastructure. I’ll go through each system, the symptoms, known affected systems and known firmware fixes. For more information on each component click on the header of the section and it’ll bring you directly to the Cisco bug search site.

Cisco Nexus 7000:

When the leap second update occurs a N7K SUP1 could have the kernel hit what is known a “livelock” condition under the following circumstances:

a. When the NTP server pushes the update to the N7K NTPd client, which in turn schedules the update to
the Kernel. This push should have happened 24 hours before June 30th, by most NTP servers.
b. When the NTP server actually updates the clock

Workaround:

On switches configured for NTP and running affected code, following workaround can be used.
1) Remove NTP/PTP configuration on the switch at least two days prior to June 30, 2015 Leap second event date.
2) Add NTP/PTP configuration back on the switch after the Leap second event date(July 1, 2015)

Known Affected Releases:

5.5(1)E2, 5.5(2), 6.0(4)

Known Fixed Releases:

5.2(6.16)S0, 5.2(7), 6.1(1)S28, 6.1(1.30)S0, 6.1(1.69), 6.2(0.217), 6.2(2)

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NetApp – Create a new volume on vFiler (7-mode)

I had to create a new volume on a vfiler recently. This is a fairly straight-forward tasks for long term NetApp admins but I thought I’d write up the process for the next time that I forget. In this example the vfiler already exists and has been exported on a different subnet than the root vfiler, vfiler0. If you’re new to vfilers then you’ll immediately notice that once you change the vfiler context to the vfiler you want to add a volume to that you don’t have the option to create a new volume. The new volume needs to be created at the root vfiler level and then assigned to the vfiler you wish. In this example I am create a new ISO datastore on a vfiler context so that one of our tenants can have their own ISO datastore. We could present out the ISO datastore from vfiler0 but that would break the security model we worked hard to put in place.

The first thing to do is change the vfiler context and then run the vol command. You will see from this that it’s not possible to create the volume directly on the vfiler.

vfiler context <tenant-vfiler>
tenant-vfiler@NTAPcontroller> vol
The following commands are available; for more information
type "vol help "
offline             options             restrict            status
online
tenant-vfiler@NTAPcontroller> vol create iso01 aggr1 200g
vol: No such command "create".
The following commands are available; for more information
type "vol help "
offline             options             restrict            status
online

So go back to the parent vfiler, vfiler0, and then create the new volume. From there you can add it to the tenant-vfiler. Before transferring the volume to the tenant-vfiler I have also changed the options to make the volume thin provisioned using the “guarantee none” setting and also set fractional_reserve to 0. The commands used to create the new volume, modify the settings and add it to the tenant-vfiler were:

tenant-vfiler@NTAPcontroller> vfiler context vfiler0
NTAPcontroller> vol create iso01 -s volume aggr1 200g
NTAPcontroller> vol options iso01 guarantee none
NTAPcontroller> vol options iso01 fractional_reserve 0
NTAPcontroller> vol status iso01
  Volume State          Status            Options
  iso01 online          raid_dp, flex     create_ucode=on, convert_ucode=on,
                        mirrored  guarantee=none, fractional_reserve=0
                        64-bit
                        Volume UUID: 0df82cec-fdb8-11e4-a27a-123478563412
                Containing aggregate: 'aggr1'

NTAPcontroller> vfiler add tenant-vfiler /vol/iso01
WARNING: reassigning storage to another vfiler does not change the security information on that storage. If the security domains are not identical, unwanted access may be permitted, and wanted access may be denied.
Tue May 19 09:47:47 EST [NTAPcontroller:cmds.vfiler.path.move:notice]: Path /vol/iso01 was moved to vFiler unit "tenant-vfiler".
Tue May 19 09:47:47 EST [NTAPcontroller:export.auto.update.disabled:warning]: /etc/exports was not updated for iso01 when the vol destroy command was run. Please either manually update /etc/exports or copy /etc/exports.new to it.
NTAPcontroller>

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UCS Central Upgrade Version 1.3 & Overview

While off on annual leave recently I had a few minutes to spare to look through twitter and came across a tweet from Adam J Bergh (@ajbergh) about a remote code execution vulnerability in Cisco UCS Central. You can read more about the threat over on threatpost.com but the synopsis is that “an exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with the privileges of the root user”. UCS Central version 1.2 and earlier are affected by this so it’s time to upgrade. Particularly since the vulnerability score is at the highest severity of 10. So before I go on I want to thank Adam for his tweet and highlighting the issue in the first place.

Pre-Requisites:

There are different steps to perform during the upgrade depending of whether UCS Central is in standalone mode or is part of a cluster. You can find more information about both methods over on the UCS Central Install and Upgrade Guide. Some of the key things to keep in mind are the supported upgrade paths and the pre-requisites before beginning the upgrade.

Important:

  • UCS Central 1.3 requires a minimum of 12Gb RAM and 40GB storage space (otherwise the upgrade will fail)
  • Use the ISO image for an upgrade to UCS Central
  • After the upgrade clear the browser cache before logging into the Cisco UCS Central GUI
  • Make sure UCS Manager is 2.1(2) or newer
  • Make sure to take a full state backup before starting the Upgrade Process

Upgrade Paths:

  • From 1.1(2a) to 1.3(1a)
  • From 1.2 to 1.3(1a)

Note: I’m running version 1.1(2a)

New Features:

Some of the new features in version 1.3 include:

  • HTML5 UI: New task based HTML5 user interface.
  • KVM Hypervisor Support: Ability to install Cisco UCS Central in KVM Hypervisor
  • Scheduled backup: Ability to schedule domain backup time. Provides you flexibility to schedule different backup times for different domain groups.
  • Domain specific ID pools: The domain specific ID pools are now available to global service profiles.
  • NFS shared storage: Support for NFS instead of RDM for the shared storage is required for Cisco UCS Central cluster installation for high availability.
  • vLAN consumption for Local Service Profiles: Ability to push vLANs to the UCS Manager instance through Cisco UCS Central CLI only without having to deploy a service profile that pulls the vLANs.
  • Support for Cisco M-Series Servers.
  • Connecting to SQL server that uses dynamic port.
  • Support for SQL 2014 database and Oracle 12c Database.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the new HTML 5 UI is like. The initial screenshots I’ve seen are awesome. There’s a nice little introduction from Cisco over on their support site. Also, Jacob Van Ewyk has written a really informative article over on Cisco Communities with details about the UCS Central User Interface Reworked with UCS Central 1.3.

Upgrade Steps:

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