#ciscohx

It’s nice that the bandwidth of the servers and the whole UCS system is getting faster and faster. Sometimes you must connect the FI 6332 with all 40 Gb ports to a 10 Gb network. How do you configure the Fabric Interconnect to have a 10 Gb connection ?

Port Configuration

First of all you should know that you can connect the 40 Gb QSFP via a QSA (1x10Gb) or breakout cable (4x10Gb). This is not configurable for every port !

Port 13 and 14 are 40 Gb ports only, which is the same for port 27-32. If you’re using QSA’s or breakout cables, don’t put it in those ports. It won’t work.

If you try it, you won’t see the option of Breakout Cable at the GUI and the CLI will give you the following error message :

  In this case the Breakout Cable is put in slot 25.

When you configure a Breakout Port, the FI should be rebooted to have the change in place !

When the FI is up and running, just wait a few minutes and then you can configure the 10 Gb port.

You will see now 4 small ports in the GUI.

And you can configure each port as a 10 Gb port for uplink or whatever.

  When you have a look at the links, you will see that Port 25 is now a Scalability port.

  So now you can configure it like it’s a 10 Gb Port.

Yes ! After doing a design clinic in 2010 and presenting Social Miner in 2012, I was lucky to do a technical Seminar in 2018 at CLEUR (Cisco Live Europe).

TECCOM-1463

The personal highlight of CLEUR 2018 was of course for me, my presentation. Because my session was on monday at 08:45, I started only with 22 people. But more come during the session and finally I had 37 people in the room. It seems not many, but for a Techtorial the participants had to pay extra, so this is a nice amount of people.

The session was of course about Hyperflex and some personal experience with installing the clusters with customers. If you don’t read the manual…. mistakes will be made..

CLEUR is not only party and presentations. It’s way more !

Here is a small impression of the rest of the event and for more information you can visit : www.ciscolive.com

World of Solution

On the WoS (World of Solution) Cisco and partners can show their product or services. I was staffing the Hyperflex booth for 2 days which gave me very nice and interessting conversations with all kind of persons. Technical and non-technical.

  And there was enough coffee at the Hyperflex Cafe !

With a lot of space to whiteboard and showing video’s on the screen.

  Meet The Engineer

One way to interact with Cisco is to schedule a “Meet The Engineer”. Then you can have a 1:1 conversation regarding questions and problems. There is always a whiteboard available, so that designing or explaining things is possible.

  On monday there was a very nice Hyperflex Customer Appriciation Event at Camp Nou, Barcelona.

And here are some generic Cisco Live photo’s.

A lot of Breakout Room !

Room 121 for TECCOM-1463

Entrance of Cisco Live

A small walk from the subway to the venue.

In large companies most of the IT people are siloed into boxes regarding their skills. So you got Networking, Compute, Storage etc admins. Some work together others don’t.

What I noticed during a lot of Hyperflex installation at customer sites, that for Hyperflex you need a HyperConverged Admin! Somebody who knows a bit of everything. Of course he/she can still have their expertise, but if the VM Admin doesn’t know what a vlan is, he can’t tell the network guy why he’s needing the vlan for the Hyperflex solution.

Let’s do a test to see if you are a HyperConverged Admin!

if (window.qmn_quiz_data === undefined) { window.qmn_quiz_data = new Object(); }

Welcome to the "What kind of Admin are You" test.

What is your email ?

What type of admin are you ?

Network Admin

Compute Admin

Storage Admin

Hypervisor Admin

IT Manager

Other Admin

Where do you create datastores ?

On the ESXi Host

In vCenter

In a service template at the Fabric Interconnects

With zones and zoning on the FC Switches.

Where to configure maintenance policy's of the servers ?

In vCenter

In UCS Manager

On the Switches

In the zonesets.

How do you configure a routable vlan ?

Just ask the Network Guy. He eats vlan's in the morning.

Configure a routing protocol on the Fabric Interconnects

Let's start to open an ssh to the router and configure the vlans on it.

I don't know.

Volumes are created at ......

vCenter

SAN Storage

Network Switches

Service Templates

Don't worry regarding the results ! You won't be fired by your boss... I hope... 😉

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Yeah !!! I am a presenter at Cisco Live Barcelona 2018

TECCOM-1463 : Technical Seminar

On mondays there are Technical Seminars which you can follow for an additional fee. This year I am presenting the Hyperflex Ins and Outs Technical Seminar. Because participants are paying extra, the preperation should be very very good and that’s why I don’t post often on this blog.

Although the agenda and presentation are finished, during the seminar I will show some live demo’s. As a backup plan I will have to record every thing I want to show. This takes a lot of time ! And it’s loaded with live demo’s !

After Cisco Live I will post some very nice new things about Hyperflex 3.0 and the configurations.

If you go to http://ciscolive.com click on Barcelona. Schedule Session and then you will see the content catalog.

Just search for Hyperflex and you will find :

The agenda for the session is :

There it is : https://intersight.com/

Cool if you know what it is and what it can do.

Why  Cisco Intersight?

Managing Data center devices can be challenging. We use the applications which are running in the Data center 24/7 and we don’t want to have any outage. And if there is one, everybody can’t wait until the problem is resolved. Right now there are a lot of managing tools for all kind of hardware.

We use apps very frequently. Not just for facebook or instagram, but also for business. Wouldn’t it be nice to manage your data center from one point ? Just have one entrance to view everything ? Here it is : Cisco Intersight !

What is Cisco Intersight ?

What if Cisco moved the management of devices to a central point, somewhere in the cloud ? You can manage your data center from any device, anywhere. Intersight become Management as a serverice (MaaS)

What can we do with Cisco Intersight ?

Cisco Intersight got right now only some features from the Base Edition. It works with Hyperflex, so that is awesome !

Base Edition

Free version, supports Cisco UCS and HyperFlex

Global monitoring of health and inventory status

User customizable dashboard

Tagging and basic search

Context launch of element managers

The Essentials edition is coming soon.

Essentials Edition

All the functionality of the Base Edition

Policy-based configuration with service profiles

Remote management and vKVM

Firmware management with scheduled updates

HCL compliance check and upgrade recommendations

How to configure Hyperflex Edge with Cisco Intersight.

First we’re opening the Hyperflex GUI.

We’re going to settings, Cloudmanagement and click preview. (Depends on the version you got.)

  First you will have to enable Starship management. Starship was the code name for Intersight.

When it’s enabled, you will see the Not Claimed status, Device ID and the Claim code.

  Let’s go to the Cisco Intersite page and sign in with your Cisco ID (Or CCO as it’s called also)

Goto devices and claim a new device.

  Now you can fill in the Device ID and Claim code you see at the Hyperflex cluster. At the Hyperflex cluster page, you will see that the status is now Claimed, so we know it got a Cisco Intersight connection.

  You will see the Hyperflex cluster at the Cisco Intersight Dashboard.

You can label/tag your environments and see the health. Cisco Intersight will be getting new features quickly.

More information on the Cisco site :

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/intersight/index.html#~stickynav=2

When you’re done with the installation of Hyperflex, there are still some steps left.

You can configure it manually, but you can also use an automated script.

Just go to https://<installer ip>/mssh 

when you have the CLI window just type : post_install

Now you got some questions and after you answered them, the cluster is completely up and running.

Just enter the vcenter and UCS-M credentials. If some links weren’t setup correctly, the install script will make sure that it’s according the doc !

Post_install look at the last cluster you configured.

If you do multiple installations and you forgot to do the post_install, you can do it always afterwards with :

post_install –cluster-ip <cluster ip address>

Right now you can download the Hyperflex Data Platform software at CCO. www.cisco.com/go/software

There are some cool features in Cisco Hyperflex 2.5 which makes the product better then the best !

In a previous post about Howto use HX Rest Explorer I talked already about the nice Rest-Explorer.

In the Hyperflex 2.5 release, things changed !

When you use https://<HX cluster>/rest-explorer you will get :

500 : {“message”:”HTTP 404 Not Found”,”messageId”:0,”object”:null} https://10.61.124.38/rest/swagger/swagger

The NEW link is now :

https://<HX Cluster>/apiexplorer

Now you see different kind of API. Way more then the previous versions.

  The working is still the same as in my other post : Howto use HX Rest Explorer

Some other HX links :

Really ? 37 Minutes to install Cisco Hyperflex ?

Howto use Hyperflex Rest Explorer. (With Video)

Expanding Hyperflex with a Compute Node is So easy !

Hyperflex Cluster Information Pages

Hyperflex Sizer For All Flash and Edge

Best 5 features of Hyperflex 2.1(1b) software

What is Cisco Hyperflex Edge ?

Hyperflex 2.0(1a) upgrade

Hyperflex Redplication Factor 2 or 3 ?