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How To: Cisco UCS Director – 5.3 to 5.4 Upgrade

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Cisco announced their release of UCS Director 5.4 back in November. As I’m currently running 5.3 and ran into an issue with a workflow Cisco support recommended upgrading to 5.4. I had a look over the Cisco UCS Director 5.4 Release Notes and there’s a new version of Java and the CentOS operating system are newer in the latest version. Due to this the upgrade procedure for 5.4 is different from previous version. In earlier versions it was possible to upload a patch via shelladmin and it would upgrade the software and database schema in place. 5.4 however requires new appliances to be deployed and a migration of database files etc. to be done between the 5.3 and 5.4 versions.

I really think that Cisco needs to look at using a HTML 5 console in the future as this upgrade path is overly complicated. Considering a lot of companies want you to be on the latest version when opening support calls, including Cisco, it would make sense for them to make it easier to perform the required upgrades.

The primary changes that have caused the modification to the upgrade path are:

  • CentOS version 5.4 to version 6.6
  • Java version 1.6 to version 1.8

Another thing to note is that version 5.54 requires 12GB RAM.

Cisco recommend standing up  the new appliances beside your current UCS Director and Bare-Metal Appliances and performing a migration. In my case there’s a few firewall rule etc already been created for the existing environment so I wanted to keep the same IP addresses and machine names. I changed the IP addresses of the current appliances to be something else within the same subnet and gave the new appliances temporary names but the existing IP addresses. Once everything had been migrated and the changes confirmed I was able to rename the appliances to be the existing ones and removed the older appliances from the infrastructure. Before commencing the upgrade I also had a sold read over the UCS Director Upgrade 5.4 Guide and the UCS Director Bare-Metal Agent 5.4 Upgrade Guide

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Cisco Champion 2016

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CiscoChampion Header

Last Saturday I awoke to find an email from Cisco Champions Program welcoming me into the Cisco Champions community for 2016. I feel humbled, honoured and excited to be selected to be part of this community. This is my first time being nominated as a Cisco Champion and for me personally it shows that I’m progressing in the direction I wished in my career.

When I began this blog a couple of years ago mainly as a drop zone for documenting technical issues I ran into I couldn’t have dreamed that I would have ended up making a contribution to the greater IT community.

For 2016 I want to continue my level of participation in the community via this blog and hopefully expand to participating in podcasts. On a local level I want to contribute more in the virtualization, data center and automation communities. And from a personal level I want to interact with the other Cisco Champions and expand my knowledge of Cisco solutions and services.

Well done to all the other Cisco Champions, particularly the other novices. It’s going to be a blast. I’m looking forward to attend CLMEL later this year as a Cisco Champion.

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Cisco UCS – FSM:FAILED: Ethernet traffic flow monitoring configuration error

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During a recent Cisco UCS upgrade I noticed an error for ethlanflowmon which was a critical alert. I hadn’t seen the problem before and it occurred right after I had upgraded UCS Manager firmware as per the steps listed in a previous post I wrote about UCS Firmware Upgrade. Before proceeding to upgrade the Fabric Interconnects I wanted to clear all alerts where possible. The alert for “FSM:FAILED: Ethernet traffic flow monitoring configuration error on” both switches was a cause for concern.

ethlanflowmon On further investigation I found that this is a known bug when upgrading to versions 2.2(2) and above. I was upgrading from version 2.2(1d) to 2.2(3d). Despite being a critical alert the issue does not impact any services. The new UCSM software is looking for new features on the FI that do not exist yet as it has not been upgraded. As soon as you upgrade the FIs this critical alert will go. More information about the bug can be found Cisco’s support page for the bug CSCul11595

 

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UCS Director – Schedule Database Backup script

by Posted in Cisco, UCS Tagged , , , 1 Comment

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

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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

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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

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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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UCS Central Upgrade Version 1.3 & Overview

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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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How To: Cisco UCS Firmware Upgrade

by Posted in Cisco, How-To, UCS Tagged , , , , 33 Comments

Edit: 22-Jan-2106

A recent comment highlighted that i was missing a step during Step 8: UPGRADE THE FABRIC INTERCONNECTS AND I/O MODULES. This was to manually change the primary status for the Fabric Interconnects to be the recently upgraded Fabric Interconnect. This way your environment remains accessible while the second FI is being upgraded. I’ve updated this step now to include the manual failover steps on the FI. It is a step I always follow when performing upgrades but I can’t think of why I didn’t originally put it into the post.

Recently I was tasked with performing an upgrade to our UCS environment to support some new B200 M4 blades. The current firmware version only supported the B200 M3 blades. As part of the process I performed the below steps to complete the upgrade. I split the upgrade into a planning phase and an implementation/upgrade phase. Upgrading firmware of any system can lead to potential outages, things have definitely improved on this over the past decade, but it’s imperative that you plan correctly to make the implementation process go without any hitches. With UCS firmware there is a specific order to follow during the upgrade process. The order to follow is:

  1. Upgrade UCS Manager
  2. Upgrade Fabric Interconnect B (subordinate) & Fabric B I/O modules
  3. Upgrade Fabric Interconnect A (primary) & Fabric A I/O modules
  4. Upgrade Blade firmware by placing each ESXi Host

During the upgrade process, and particularly during the Fabric Interconnect and I/O module upgrades you will see a swarm of alerts coming from UCSM. This is expected as some of the links will be unavailable as part of the upgrade process so wait until all the steps have been completed before raising an issue with support. As a caveat however, if there is anything that really stands out as not being right open a call with support and get it fixed before proceeding to the next step. During my upgrade process some of the blades showed critical alerts that did not clear and the blades needed to be decommissioned and re-acknowledged to resolve it. This problem stood out and wasn’t hard to recognise that it was more serious that the other alerts.

PLANNING PHASE:

You will need to check the release requirements from Cisco regarding the upgrade path from your current firmware version to the desired version and also the capabilities that the desired firmware version contains. The upgrade process takes some time so it’s best to review everything in advance and not have to do this on the day of the upgrade itself. For instance during this upgrade process I needed to ensure capability to support B200 M4 blades and VIC 1340 modules as they had been purchased as part of an order for a new project. The steps to carry out in the planning phase are:

Step 1: Verify the Upgrade requirements

Check the release version notes on Cisco’s website for the version you want to upgrade to. For this example we are upgrading to version 2.2

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/ucs_2_2_rn.html

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Fix: Cisco UCSM – Default Keyring’s certificate is invalid

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Recently during some prep work for a UCS firmware upgrade I noticed that there was a major alert showing for keyring certificate being invalid. At first I was a bit concerned but since it didn’t affect my login to UCS Manager I assumed it wasn’t too serious. After a bit of searching around the internet I found from Cisco’s site the CLI Configuration Guide for UCS (page 6) which shows the quick and easy fix to the problem.

planning-fault check major

Open an SSH session to the IP address/hostname of UCS Manager. It will connect to the primary Fabric Interconnect. Enter the commands in the order of steps below:

Step 1 UCS-A# scope security

Step 2 UCS-A /security # scope keyring default

Step 3 UCS-A /security/keyring # set regenerate yes

Step 4 UCS-A /security/keyring # commit-buffer

After the commit-buffer command has been issues all GUI sessions will be disconnected and you will need to log in again. When you log in next time you’ll be prompted to accept the new certificate. Once accepted UCSM will open and the alert will now be gone.

All fairly quick and painless!