UCS Manager

There are a few pieces of Cisco UCS equipment in the data center:

• One UCS 5108 blade enclosure, accommodating up to 8 B200 server blades of various generations
• 2 UCS-FI-6248UP fabric interconnects, which sit between UCS servers or blade chassis and the rest of the network
• 1 UCS C220 M5 server

Cisco UCS Manager gets installed on the Fabric Interconnects and does Cisco proprietary magic things. This document is being written to capture knowledge of installation, upgrades, and server management tasks.

How to get

Much (all?) of Cisco's UCS software is available directly without a support contract. But a customer account is required to download. Registration is free as in beer. I have had one since July 2021 and have not been troubled with Cisco spam or any sort of "are you a real person at a real company?" validation.

As this is written, UCS Infrastructure and UCS Manager Software is the place to get it. As I have some older, end-of-life, end-of-support fabric interconnects (62xx series) which are not supported on the current 6.0 release train, I have instead selected the 4.2(3p) version for download. This comes as a 1Gbyte-ish ucs-k9-bundle-infra.4.2.3p.A.bin file.

Untested Fabric Interconnect, what do we do?

5ish years ago (summer 2021), I acquired three of these 6248UP FIs. And I think I got one of them configured for use on the management network and updated to then-current software. I'm not sure which of the three that was. And I am sure I did no documentation at the time. So here we are with new notes.