UCS Central Global Service Profile and vNIC ordering

[thomsonac]

Hey all,

We're having some difficulty fully moving to UCS Central as some of the functionality we rely on in UCSM and local service profiles don't seem to *stick* in global service profiles, specifically vNIC ordering.

In UCSM it's pretty trivial to set the desired order for vNICs which is critical for ESXi as we use automated scripts to set up the hosts and add the hosts to vDSes.  Below is a picture of our local service profile vNIC setup.

This is a UCS Powertool output of one of the vNICs on the local service profile.  It seems that the desired order is in a field "order".  Easy right?

The problem is that I cannot find any GUI interface in UCS Central to set the desired order.  What is happening is that the Global Service Profile picks a different order (sometimes random) for the vNICs which screws up all of our existing scripts.

So I figured I'd give UCS Central PowerTool a shot.  For those of you who have not used it before, it's a bit rough.  You can do most things but piping is mostly broken, there isn't much documentation, and there are some oddities (like how to associate a global service profile to a blade).  With the following command the input is accepted and I get a prompt to change the vNIC followed by text output showing that the order updated.

get-ucscentralserviceprofile <GlobalServiceProfileName> | Get-UcsCentralVnic -name "eth0" | Set-UcsCentralVnic -Order 1

Unfortunately, if you do a get of the same vNIC immediately after it supposedly updated the vNIC, it shows the order back to the standard "unspecified".

Am I missing something?  Could anyone offer some insight?

Thanks!

[thomsonac]

Just wanted to add a follow-up that suggests this might be an underlying bug (crippling for us).  I found the location in the UCSC GUI to make changes.

Open the Global Service Profile Template vNIC Placement tab and this screen pops up.  Select any vNIC and then adjust the location.  That results in the PCI Order field getting populated with numbers.

After setting the desired configuration, clicking "Save" in the bottom right greys out the button indicating that the options are actually saved.  However, clicking away from the screen gives the standard pop-up.

So it seems that all processes to actually change the order are not getting saved.  GUI, PowerTools, Resource-Mgr.

[thomsonac]

Just in case anyone runs across this, it's a verified bug with UCS Central. Supposedly this was fixed in a previous version but it's still popping up.  Cisco should be addressing it in an upcoming release.

[jean.moncrieffe@suntrust.com]

The ability to specify vNIC and vHBA order does not exist in 2.0(1f) as it does in UCSM or 1.x - either that or I need help finding it

[Matthew Faiello · Accepted solution]

This has been fixed...certainly upgrading to the latest 1.2.1f will be beneficial.

[thomsonac]

We just upgraded to 1f and have not yet had a chance to verify the fix since we have working templates through a (hokey) workaround of using vCon policies.  Glad to see that Cisco responded to our (and others?) bug submission.

To that end- we have a number of other bugs that we'd like to submit but do not have a good venue for.  In the past, we've just opened TAC cases but those are a bit clunky.  Can you suggest something?

[jean.moncrieffe@suntrust.com]

I think the problem still exists with 2.0.1f

[jean.moncrieffe@suntrust.com]

Found it. in 2.0(1f) after receiving help. Thanks.