I had the pleasure of spending time yesterday evening with a great customer in the Carolinas (thanks guys) working on a Cisco UCS C series server, where the goal was to install the P81E Cisco Virtual Interface Card (VIC) and carve up some virtual interfaces.

First, we had to shut down the server and assign it an address for use with CIMC so we could hit the server directly. Once this was done, we saw the firmware version of the CIMC was at 1.1.1. One of the requirements of the P81E is firmware for the CIMC specifically at 1.2.x or greater. On the Cisco website when downloading the latest firmware all that was offered for the 1.4 code was the Cisco Host Update Utility, which downloads as an ISO.

When using this, it clearly states that you CANNOT upgrade the BIOS or CIMC versions with the Utility until you're at 1.2 or later. Since we were at 1.1, we had to download the BIOS / CIMC upgrades separately (which download as ZIP files containing the necessary BIN files). While that was downloading we updated all the other components using the Host Update Utility by mounting the ISO as Virtual Media via the CIMC interface-- love this interface by the way.

When trying to upload the new firmware for the CIMC, we used the Browser Client, which lets you browse to a file on your local hard drive and upload it. This method failed several times, with only an "HTTP ERROR" status. When we switched over and used the TFTP server option, it worked without issues, and got out CIMC to the 1.2.x code desired. Finally.

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From here, we had to let the CIMC reboot and then reconnect back in, where we found this nifty new tab under the "Inventory" menu on the main Server tab (left hand side).

<img class="aligncenter" src="http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5565/p81eadapterstab.png" alt="" width="622" height="134" />

On the Adapters tab it shows the Cisco VIC card and some additional tabs for vNICs / vHBAs.

<img class="aligncenter" src="http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/8808/p81eadaptersvnicstab.png" alt="" width="578" height="371" />

Here's the fun part-- creating vNICs and/or vHBAs. This is somewhat similar to the Palo adapter on the UCS B series servers, and all the vNICs you carve here are presented without any additional drivers or installation steps (assuming ESXi 4.1 or later as the hypervisor), at 10Gbps. Simply clone an existing vNIC/vHBA or add a new one, set the properties as desired, and fire up the server.

<img class="aligncenter" src="http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/9918/p81evnicview.png" alt="" width="736" height="276" />

One additional note that's semi related-- other vendors let you carve the NICs and show only the bandwidth they have presented. In a vSphere world, if you carve up a bunch of interfaces and they show up as anything less than 10Gb, you are limited to 4 vMotions at a time, max. With 10Gb, it will move 8 at a time-- which is faster evacuation or hosts going into maintenance mode (most of the time 8 VMs are in flight at once).

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