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Cisco VIC Boot from SAN troubleshooting

January 5, 2012 by rshughes

Boot from SAN is not necessarily one of the easiest things in the world; however,
Cisco UCS does take away a lot of the complexity with its Service Profiles and
associated Boot Policies. I’m not going to get into an exhaustive post around
booting from SAN on Cisco UCS as I think most people have readily documented
and how it works. However one important caveat to keep in mind is that the Cisco
M81K-R does not have an “HBA BIOS” that is typically available in the Emulex or
Qlogic HBA/CNA’s that we’re all familiar with. If you’re unfamiliar with the HBA
BIOS utilities, this is typically as Cntrl+E or Cntrl+Q sequence that you can type in
as a host is booting up so you can have the HBA log into the fabric and scan for its
available luns.

Not to turn into a Debbie Downer, but there is a very easy way to circumvent this
caveat and make use of the lovely UCSM CLI. As the host is booting, you can
connect the VIC adapter and have it log into the fabric and list its luns. Couple this
with the dialogue from the UCS Boot Policy and we can easily troubleshoot any
SAN booting issues. This method negates any need for having a traditional HBA
BIOS created for the Cisco VIC family and demonstrates from the real power of the
UCSM CLI.

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It should also be noted that once the host has completed booting, the host drivers
will take over and the VIC drivers will not be accessible for scanning the fabric. See
below for some of the command walk through.

(h ps://angryjesters.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/vic-boot-from-san-policy1.jpg)

For the example of this post, we’ll be logging into a Xiotech array which has a
WWPN ID of 20:00:00:1F:93:00:12:9E. Our Service Profile is a ached to Blade 1/1 in
our UCS deployment (which is a B200-M2 and thus the adapter is located at slot 1).
So first we’ll connect down to our VIC firmware:
UCS-6200-TOP-A#
UCS-6200-TOP-A# connect adapter 1/1/1
adapter 1/1/1 # connect
adapter 1/1/1 (top):1# a ach-fls
Now we’ll list our vnic ID’s and force the VIC to log into the SAN fabric
adapter 1/1/1 (fls):5# vnic
—- —- —- ——- ——-
vnic ecpu type state lif
—- —- —- ——- ——-
7 1 fc active 4
8 2 fc active 5
adapter 1/1/1 (fls):4# login 7
lifid: 4
ID PORTNAME NODENAME FID
0: 20:00:00:1f:93:00:12:9e 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 0xa70400
Looks like we’ve successfully logged into the fabric as we’ve got a successful
PLOGI ( see above ) and now we can report out which luns we have access to

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adapter 1/1/1 (fls):5# lunmap 7

lunmapid: 0 port_cnt: 1
lif_id: 4
PORTNAME NODENAME LUN
PLOGI
20:00:00:1f:93:00:12:9e 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 0000000000000000 Y
adapter 1/1/1 (fls):6# lunlist 7
vnic : 7 lifid: 4
– FLOGI State : flogi est (fc_id 0xa70804)
– PLOGI Sessions
– WWNN 20:00:00:1f:93:00:12:9e WWPN 20:00:00:1f:93:00:12:9e fc_id 0xa70400
– LUN’s configured (SCSI Type, Version, Vendor, Serial No.)
LUN ID : 0x0000000000000000 (0x0, 0x4, XIOTECH , 3BCC01C4)
– REPORT LUNs Query Response
LUN ID : 0x0000000000000000
– Nameserver Query Response
– WWPN : 20:00:00:1f:93:00:12:9e

Great – everything is working as expected and our Windows 2008 server

successfully booted from our Xiotech array. Special thanks to Jeff Allen
(h p://jeffsaidso.com) and some other helpful Cisco people in pointing this
awesome feature.
(h ps://angryjesters.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/vic-boot-from-san-policy1.jpg)
(h ps://angryjesters.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/vic-boot-from-san-policy.jpg)
Posted in cisco_ucs, VIC | Tagged m81k-r, san, ucs | 7 Comments

7 Responses

Chris Angulo on January 12, 2012 at 9:55 am | Reply

Thanks for sharing. I enjoy learning something new everyday.

Technology Short Take #20 - on January 20, 2012 at 5:48 am | Reply

blog.sco lowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization,
storage, and servers
[…] put this under the “Servers” category even though it’s storage-related: In
this post, Ryan Hughes explains how to use the UCSM CLI to do some cool—
and useful—boot from SAN […]

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Fred on January 20, 2012 at 4:44 pm | Reply

At 10000 ft, Its even simpler than this..for blade in question:
1. verify blade in question has Flogid into FI on at least 1 vHBA path.
2. assuming target WWPN is correct in the boot policy, with
blade KVM open, quiet boot off, boot blade, look for target wwpn/LUN in VIC
option ROM at boot time.

If option ROM does not show the target LUN at boot time, you know for sure
that theres either a lun masking or zoning issue upstream from UCS. Its true
that the option ROM doesnt have a config utility but its not totally useless for
troubleshooting.

Since the goal of the above commands is to determine flogi/plogi status, its not
faster than the article commands, but its a no brainer.

Kimberly Enciso on January 25, 2012 at 5:34 am | Reply

Bookmarked! Thanks for an amazing post, will read your others posts.

Cisco UCS Boot-from-SAN on February 13, 2012 at 2:30 pm | Reply

Troubleshooting with the Cisco VIC (Part 2) | Jeff Said So
[…] Hughes (@angryjesters) got the ball rolling on this. He took it upon himself
to write an excellent article explaining how to access the obscure-but-useful
command called LUNLIST. So if you are looking for […]

UCS Boot-from-SAN Troubleshooting on February 13, 2012 at 2:31 pm | Reply

with the Cisco VIC (Part 2) | Jeff Said So
[…] Hughes (@angryjesters) got the ball rolling on this. He took it upon himself
to write an excellent article explaining how to access the obscure-but-useful
command called LUNLIST. So if you are looking for […]

Mike H on December 31, 2012 at 10:05 am | Reply

Have you seen any issues with performance of Xiotech arrays with UCS
/ MDS? I am seeing major performance issues when doing p2v’s to
UCS/Xio environment (datastores dropping offline. etc)

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