Blog‎ > ‎

CCIE DC UCS Associating Service Profile with Server Blades

posted Jul 14, 2014, 11:42 AM by Rick McGee   [ updated Jul 15, 2014, 5:59 PM ]
So from the ESXi Service profile you can crate a template form that service profile and you can create really fast service profiles as long as they are similar SP's. For instance ESXi SP Template or a Windows 2008/2013 Server Template. You can also Clone a SP from another SP as well. 
These will be determined by the the NIC Adapter and HBA policies for each individual OS.




This example shows a SP Template for ESXi that is an updating template. The updating template has the behavior of once the template is updated all SP's that where created from it will be updated as well. This may or may not cause the server to reboot, so changes to the template would have to be done after-hours during a maintenance window.

Once you created the SP's from the temp you will not be able to go into each SP and make changes, however you'll be able to make changes to the template itself

You can unbind the SP from the updating template with the following:
Now after you click this, you'll be able to make changes directly to the SP.


In the example the SP's have already been associated with blades that where from the server pools
As you can see form this example the SP_ESXI-2 has ben associated with chassis-1/blade-1
The FSM is the Finite Sate Machine that show the the process of the blade being associated with the Service Profile.  You can also disassociate the SP with the blade and manually assign it to another blade


You can KVM to the device and after a few boot cycles it will show the IOSLINUX image being loaded
In this example we are KVM'ing form the Service Profile, you can also KVM from the blade itself as well.


This IOSLINUX makes all the changes to the BIOS and Blade components such as the Mezzanine adapters, vNIC's, vHBA's 


From the KVM window you would pick the Virtual Media tab and map a Virtual CD drive that has the ESXi installer.
Click "Add Image" and browse to the installer file and check mapped.

You may have to reboot the server as the CD is mapped and hit the F6 Boot Menu form the BIOS and enter the CD setup.

Arrow down to the Cisco Virtual CD/DVD drive


You'll see the following

After the installer package unpacks all the contents of the file, you'll have to choose a disk to install the Hypervisor. You can install to a local disk, or a SAN disk device. If you have a SAN Disk device you have to make sure that the proper zoning is configured on your MDS switches.

The SEGATE is SAN disk in a JBOD. Arrow down to that as drive and hit Enter.

ESXi will will ask for what keyboard layout you want to use and root password.


You'll see the VMWare status for the installation if it was able to write to the drive.
After installation is complete hit F2 to change the Management IP Address to mange the VMWare hyper visor 

After this is done assuming you have Layer 3 connectivity you can go to your desktop and download the VSphere client.


On your desktop install the application and run VSphere Client


Through this GUI Mgmt. you would create all of your LAN and Settings for that particular VMWare host

Here you would add another vmmic for failover for the mgmt. network
Click on Properties 
Click Add...

As you can see it see's all the vNIC's that we created as part of the Service Profile. Click the box for vmmic1 and add for the mgmt. ports and click next

Here is shows the purpose of the vnmics Mgmt. vSwitch

Hi-light the vSwitch and click edit to configure the hashing algorithm to use for the two vmnics.


Only use Route based on the origination virtual port ID. Click okay and you'll now see the following.

It added the second vmmic to the mgmt. network. 

Next click on Add Networking to create another vSwitch
Click VMkernel 

Choose vmmc 2 and 3 and click next...
Label the network and place the VLAN number used for vMotion.

Assign it an IP address from the subnet. Click next and then finish.

You'll now see the vSwitch, click on Properties, and edit the vSwitch 
Move down the vmmic 3 to Standby Adapters group. You really wouldn't need the second vmnic, it all depends on how your VMWare administrator likes the vmnic's presented to VMWare. Click OK

Click Add Networking again to create the last vSwtich for the Virtual Machines

Click Virtual Machine and next....
Add the final two vmnics and click next.....
Click Next... This will be deleted later and replaced by the Cisco Nexus 1000V

Check the Storage Adapters settings.

Make sure the WWN's match each target....

Look at the Storage section for the Data Store...



Use template for the VCenter
Use the provisioning as you normally would for your network. Thin provisioning works best for lab setups.

You would next setup the second VMWare host with the same vSwtiches that correspond to the vSwtiches. You would want to rename the datastore on VMWare host two to DataStore2.






Hint: If you want to use the same ISO file, you may run into issues if you use the same ISO file, you can just make a copy of the file as name it as v2 and you'll be able to install tow instances of VMWare as the same time.





Comments