Cisco has released UCS Manager version 1.3(1c). This is the first public release in the 1.3 line, also known as “Aptos+”.
Release notes are here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/ucs_22863.html
Haven’t gotten a chance to play with the new version yet, but there are some significant enhancements. Among them…
- 1 GE support on UCS6120 and UCS6140 Fabric Interconnects
- On the 6120, you can now use 1GE transceivers in the first 8 physical ports.
- On the 6140, you can now use 1GE transceivers in the first 16 physical ports.
- Watch for a post soon on why I think this is a bad idea. 🙂
- Support for the new, 2nd generation mezzanine cards
- Both Emulex and Qlogic have produced a 2nd generation mezzanine card, using a single-chip design which should lower power consumption
- Be warned that these new mezzanine cards won’t support the “Fabric Failover” feature as supported by the first generation CNAs, or by the VIC (Palo) adapter
- These aren’t shipping quite yet, but will be soon
- A Broadcom BCM57711 mezzanine adapter
- This will compete with the Intel based, 10GE mezzanine adapters that UCS has had until now
- The Broadcom card supports TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and iSCSI Offload, but not iSCSI boot
- An updated Intel mezzanine adapter, based on the Niantic chipset
- Both Emulex and Qlogic have produced a 2nd generation mezzanine card, using a single-chip design which should lower power consumption
- Support for the B440-M1 blade
- The B440 blade will be available in a 2 or 4 processor configuration, using the Intel Xeon 7500 processors
- Up to 4 SFFP hard drives
- 32 DIMM slots, for up to 256GB of memory
- 2 Mezzanine slots
- Full-width form factor
- SSD hard drive support in B200-M2, B250-M2, and B440-M1 blades
- First drive available is a Samsung 100GB SSD
- Improved SNMP support
- This has been a weakness since the original release of UCSM
- SNMP traps are now available for all UCS components, including blades, chassis, etc.
- Download the MIB information here: ftp://ftp-sj.cisco.com/pub/mibs/supportlists/ucs/ucs-supportlist.html
- Ability to configure more BIOS options, such as virtualization options, through the service profiles
- This is a big step towards making UCS blades honestly and truly stateless
- Previously, I’d recommended that UCS customers configure each blade’s BIOS options to support virtualization when they received them, whether or not they were going to use ESX/etc on all of the blades. This way they didn’t have to worry about setting them again when moving service profiles
- Support for heterogeneous mezzanine adapters in full-width blades
- Increased the supported limit of chassis to 14.
- Increased the limit of VLANs in UCSM to 512
- There’s been some discussion around this lately, particular in the service provider space. Many service providers need many more VLANs than this for their architectures.
- I’ve seen reference to a workaround using ESX, Nexus 1000V, private VLANs, and a promiscuous VLAN through the Fabric Interconnect into an upstream switch, but I’m still trying to get my head around that one. 🙂
- Ability to cap power levels per blade
- Will have to wait until I get a chance to test out the code level to see what kinds of options are available here
Looking forward to seeing customer reaction to the new features.