CIMC question 1

[ReallyRotten]

What is the impact of shutting down CIMC in the middle of the day to upgrade firmware? I can't find anything that would indicate it's a bad thing but...someone may have had a different experience. Thanks!

 

[whykap]

it is an outage. It will reboot the UCS server so plan accordingly

 

[ReallyRotten]

Thank you. The upgrade to CIMC took 2 hours going from 1.5 to 2.0 to 3.0. The server did hang and I had to get someone down to the data center to pull the plug and restart it. The other server didn't have the same experience, but it still took 2 hours to upgrade everything.

 

[ADB100]

Firmware upgrades on Cisco UCS boxes take ages. I thought it was due to the .ISO image being mounted over the CIMC session over the network but even locally on the same GigE switch it takes an age. Upgrading HP Proliants with the RomPaq CD/DVD doesn't take anywhere near as long (or it didn't when I upgraded a couple of DL380 G7's the other week) and its more or less the same process? Not sure what (if any) extra things the UCS update does that takes so long?

 

[ReallyRotten]

I'm not sure why it takes so long but it's annoying. You can't really tell at what stage the upgrade is since the screen hangs in one spot for what I think is a significant amount of time. You have to take a nap and come back hoping for the best.

 

[ADB100]

I have never tried it as I don't have a USB DVD drive but you can burn the firmware to a DVD and boot from that to go through the upgrade which might be quicker? Cisco UCS servers will boot from USB sticks but the firmware updates won't run - I guess its a security thing? Therefore you have to connect to the CIMC via a browser and map/mount the .ISO image over the network.