UCS Fabric Interconnect Firmware Upgrade

As we move closer and closer to having an extremely robust lab environment, we have picked up a set of Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects. Never worked with them before? Well, neither had I until just a week or so ago. After taking them out of the box, I noticed the firmware was extremely outdated and needed some attention. This how-to is a simple guide on how-to upgrade the firmware on a UCS-FI in stand-alone mode.

Before upgrading firmware

  • If you are upgrading UCS-FI devices in production, make sure you understand the potential impact. The fabric interconnect as well as the corresponding I/O modules will reboot.
  • When you download a firmware image bundle, a Fabric Interconnect needs at least twice as much available space as the size of the firmware image bundle.
  • This guide assumes you have at minimum a base configuration on your UCS-FI device.

Outage Impacts of Direct Firmware Upgrades

  • When you perform a direct firmware upgrade on an fabric interconnect, you can disrupt traffic or cause an outage in one or more of the endpoints in the Cisco UCS domain.
  • The fabric interconnect reboots.
  • The corresponding I/O modules reboot.

Perform the Upgrade

  • From your browser, navigate to https://<ip address of management interface>

old_version

  • For this document, we will be using https://172.16.55.11
  • Select Launch UCS Manager

UCS login screen

NOTE: This version only runs on Java 7u40

java

  • Login using the administrative credentials either local or LDAP. This will vary depending on your setup.
  • Select Firmware Management from the tab

           Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 10.03.34 AM

  • Select Download Firmware
  • Select either the local copy on the machine you are working from or a remote location. For demonstration purposes,I have put this on my local desktop. You are simply loading the .bin file to the device to prep for activation.

           Select_firmware 

           files_transfer

  • Select Activate Firmware. From the dropdown box, select the startup version you just uploaded. 

            succesful_activation  activate firmware

  • After activating the new firmware, you will lose connectivity for less than 1 minute to the UCS Manager GUI.
  • Verify new firmware by selecting Installed Firmware from the tab.