UCS Director : Shell access with root account and shelladmin menu change

Introduction

When you do some troubleshooting in UCS Director, sometimes you may need to access as a root. From 4.0.0.3 or 4.1.0.0 code or above you can enable Root access from Shelladmin menu.

Procedure

Here is how to enable shell access with root account :

1. Select 22 and C to configure

2. Select 22 and E to enable Root Access

3. Select 23 to login as Root

Just one side note in shelladmin menu. There are some changes in 4.1.0.0 shelladmin menu as below. All the options in Menu remains the same except a following :

UCS Director : How to enable Dashboard and add report widgets?

Introduction

Dashboard is first window that admin can view when he logs in to the appliance. Any report widget in the appliance can be added to the Dashboard. Admin can enable Dashboard (in the top level menu) for adding important/favourite report widgets.

Procedure

Click on admin which is at the top right-side of the window and this will bring you a small new window.

Now you have a small popup window and you can check the box "Enable Dashboard" and apply.

As a default, there will not report widget.

Next step is add report widgets. So go to Virtual and select Compute > Summary

Click on top right side of a report and select “Add to Dashboard”

Now you have the report widget in the Dashboard as below :

UCS B - How to find traffic path from VEM blade to FI?

Background

When you do some connectivity troubleshooting with Nexus1Kv, you may need to trace connectivity entire end-to-end. So the purpose of this document is to show a step by step procedure how to find traffic path from VEM blade to FI.

Troubleshooting Steps

At VEM host  

vemcmd show port | grep <VM name>

Connect to ESXi host. 

The first command you would use is "vemcmd show port". This cmd will give vethernet interface # corresponding to VM Nic. Make sure to use pipe and grep with <VM name>.

At VSM (Nexus1K)

sh int virtual pinning

Now we know a virtual machine called "VM3" is connected to Veth5 in VEM. Connect to VSM. At the VSM console we can find  how the veth5 is pinned to which pnic for this blade. Use "show interface virtual pinning" command to understand the pinning between vethernet and pnic (ethernet).

As below, we can see that Veth5 is associated with pnic (Eth4/6)

sh cdp ne int e3/5

We are still in the blade. Next we will verify FI Vethernet interface connecting to the VEM host.

VEM pNIC (Eth3/5) is connecting to Vethernet1463 in FI-A

At FI

sh pinning border-interface

At the FI, we can view the relationship of the VIF (Veth) interfaces to the FI physical interfaces towards the upstream switch. In below example, the border interface is Po100.

sh port-channel summary
Since the border interface is Port-channel interface, you can run show port-channel summary" command to see the member port.

Now you are in good position to check the physical interface stats as you have a full picture of the end to end traffic flow via Nexus1Kv.