I’ve been involved in many a Cisco UCS Manager Firmware Upgrade. Cisco’s documentation if you don’t find the exact right page is confusing. If you don’t elect to do an automatic installation, you need to do the components in the proper order. Personally, I’ve had issues doing it with the automatic deployment. I do it manually. If you want to do it manually as well, here’s the correct order and some caveats.
Cisco UCS Manager Firmware Upgrade Procedure
- Verify the proper firmware, drivers, etc. for your hardware and the OS (whether it’s Windows, VMware, etc.) your servers run.
- Upload the Infrastructure Bundle into UCSM, so it’s ready to deploy.
- Determine the primary and subordinate Fabric Interconnect. I like to SSH into UCSM, and run the following to give me that info plus general cluster health status before proceeding:
show cluster extended-state
- Go to Admin > Communication Management > Call Home, and turn off call home. You don’t want Cisco calling you thinking UCSM is on fire, when you’re doing an upgrade, right?
- Check alerts and verify the system is healthy before proceeding. Fix anything that’s potentially a problem.
- Take a backup of your UCS configuration.
- Activate the new version of UCS Manager. Verify it completes, and no unexpected errors result. It is possible that sometimes errors are expected, and it’s OK to proceed. Here’s an example. Look them up!
- Update the firmware on the IO Modules by going to Equipment > Chassis > Chassis number > IO Modules > IO Module you want to upgrade > General > Update firmware. Repeat on the second IO Module. You can track the progress on the Update Status portion of the general page.
- Activate the firmware on the IO Modules by going to Equipment > Chassis > Chassis number > IO Modules > IO Module you want to upgrade > General > Activate firmware. Clear the checkbox for “Set Startup Version Only” to have the code change take effect immediately. If you leave this option enabled, you’ll need to reboot the IOM Module yourself. I recommend clearing it, and let UCSM reboot it for you. You may also receive the error: “Failed start activation. Manual upgrade/activation is disallowed because the Default Infrastructure Policy ‘Startup Version’ is set. Retry the operation after changing the version to ‘Not Set'” Check out this post for the solution.
- Activate Firmware on subordinate Fabric Interconnect by going to Equipment > Installed Firmware. Right click the subordinate FI, select Activate Firmware, and select the new firmware package. Verify when the FI comes back up it is running the proper new version, and that your network and storage redundancy is working properly.
- Failover the UCSM cluster by connecting to UCSM via SSH, and run the following:
connect local-mgmt cluster lead b
- Active the firmware on the formerly primary FI, which is now the subordinate by repeating the above, but do the other FI this time. Verify it’s running the proper new version, and your network and storage redundancy is working properly.
- Validate network connectivity and storage multipathing.
- Turn back on CallHome.
- Take a backup of the final configuration.
That’s how to do a manual Cisco UCS Manager Firmware Upgrade.