Cisco Capability Catalogue

[gman66]

Hi Folks - we just had a major outage, and the only errors I see in UCSM pertain to the capability catalogue.   I have upgraded firmware many times and never really knew this even existed until the recent outage.   My questions to the community are as follows:

1.  What is this actually used for?   I have yet to see a good description of its function in UCSM, it would appear to me that it is only used to provide a listing of compatible components for a specific firmware version, but like I said, I don't know anything about this 

2.  If the catalogue is updated to a newer version than the firmware version we are running, what is the impact?  and why would one want to do this at all?   (note, I did read that upgrading to a newer version, as long as you are in the same family, like 3.0 as opposed to 3.1. its safe to do so, but why would one want to do this?  Again, this goes back to what is this thing really doing in UCSM?

3. Can this cause an outage if not correct?   Have you ever seen the mismatch hardware error? its a critical error being generated by this catalogue.   Is an outage possible if a component is installed that isn't properly supported by the existing firmware?  I would think yes.  Wrong firmware can cause an outage, but my assumption is that it typically happens on the blade after you upgrade the firmware on that blade, not months down the road where everything goes down all at once, halting all IO over the FIs

4. I also read that after you upgrade the catalogue it takes affect immediately without need for any reboots, but during our outage, after we rebooted the an FI (which brought service back to life), that is pretty much when we suddenly started to see all the mismatch hardware errors, not prior to the outage, but after the reboot of the FI

Note, after you downgrade the catalogue to the version of firmware deployed, the errors went away....   

Yes, I have a case open with TAC, but the engineering working on it was unable to explain anything about this catalogue to me

Thanks in advance for any expertise you can provide around this catalogue and the mismatch hardware errors it produces.  

Gman66

[Wes Austin]

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-manager/GUI-User-Guides/Firmware-Mgmt/3-2/b_UCSM_GUI_Firmware_Management_Guide_3_2/b_UCSM_GUI_Firmware_Management_Guide_3_2_chapter_0110.pdf 

1. The Capability Catalog is a set of tunable parameters, strings, and rules. Cisco UCS uses the catalog to update the display and configurability of components such as newly qualified DIMMs and disk drives for servers. In short, its so UCSM knows what hardware components you are installing in the server and can identify them correctly.

2. Unless otherwise instructed by Cisco Technical Assistance Center, you only need to activate the capability catalog update after you've downloaded, updated, and activated a Cisco UCS Infrastructure Software Bundle. As soon as you activate a capability catalog update, Cisco UCS immediately updates to the new baseline catalog. You do not have to perform any further tasks. Updates to the capability catalog do not require you to reboot or reinstall any component in a Cisco UCS domain.

Why would you update the catalog? For example, If you get a replacement DIMM module that is not able to be identified by the current UCS capability catalog. Maybe the DIMM was manufactured after the current capability catalog was released. 

3. Just having the catalog incorrect should not cause an outage. There are defects where activating the capability catalog may unintentionally cause service impact, but those defects should be documented.

It almost sounds like you uploaded a corrupted catalog, incorrect catalog version for the firmware you are on or potentially experienced a software defect. It would be hard to make that determination without reviewing further information.