Custom ESXi 5 ISO for UCS, Nexus 1000v and PowerPath VE

With ESXi 5 VMware made it very easy to create custom installation ISOs. I have been doing a lot of upgrades from ESXi 4.1 in our customer sites that have UCS, Nexus 1000v and PowerPath VE so I decided to create a custom ISO that includes the current UCS enic/fnic drivers and Nexus 1000v/PowerPath VE.

When I first started doing these upgrades I would remove the host from the Nexus 1000v VDS, uninstall Nexus 1000v VEM and uninstall PowerPath VE. After upgrading/rebuilding the host I would then use VUM to install Nexus 1000v VEM add it back to the VDS and then install PowerPath VE.

Advertisement

ESXi 4.1 to 5 Upgrades with VUM

I have been doing a lot of ESXi 4.1 to 5 upgrades of late and every time I tried using vCenter Update Manager I would get an incompatible driver warning for these 2 ESXi 4.1 driver packages

• oem-vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx
• oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net-vxge

Cisco UCS PowerShell Configuration Script

As a follow up from yesterday’s post (UCS PowerShell Health check HTML report) I figured I would post a video demonstrating a UCS configuration script that I just finished.

The video starts with me showing an un-configured UCS cluster, I go through all of the tabs, pools, policies and templates showing that there is no configuration.

Cisco UCS PowerShell Health Check Report

I have been slack on my blog posts of late, mostly because of motivation but I have also been very busy with very little free time to spare.

I like being busy and I have been working on some cool projects, mostly with UCS, Nexus, vSphere and EMC storage.

A few weeks ago I finally had a few days in the lab so I decided to take a look a the Cisco UCS Powertool. I didn’t really have anything big planned I was more just curious about it.