Hey all, I'm in the process of adding our new (and first) UCS systems into Solarwinds, and there are a few questions coming up.
A little searching produced various bits of info, but much of it was from 2013 and prior. Other threads present very limited sections of the process, so I thought we could get a thread going that covers the whole thing.
(Obligatory reference to an old KB on the subject: http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/orion/docs/settingupciscoucs.pdf)
We're starting with 3 UCS chassis, and two fabric interconnects. Solarwinds NPM is running version 11.5.2.
Configuration steps:
1. UCSM has been configured for LDAP authentication with our corporate AD domain. Connectivity to UCSM has been configured over HTTPS, SNMP has been configured with a secure community string (fun fact, UCSM didn't like the "@" character in its community string), and a domain service account has been established with global read permissions to UCSM.
2. IP addresses for each of the fabric interconnects have been configured and noted, and the virtual IP for UCSM has also been configured and noted. For the purpose of this example, we'll call them:
- Fab1 : x.x.x.1
- Fab2 : x.x.x.2
- UCSM : x.x.x.3
First Issue (Possibly Answered) How are the nodes supposed to be added into Solarwinds? Most instructions refer to adding the primary FI running UCSM first, configured to poll for UCSM information. But if you do that, and UCSM switches to the passive FI, won't you lose UCSM monitoring? Alternatively, I thought I could add UCSM by its virtual IP, but doing that still populates the resources from the FI its currently associated with.
Answer (Maybe): 3. I decided to add each FI as a node without UCSM polling, and then I added the Mgmt VIP with UCSM polling. I configured each FI to poll all interfaces, and I configured the Mgmt node to only poll non-interface elements. The idea here was for the Mgmt node to focus on UCS polling and let the FI nodes handle interface issues. Polling some of the stuff at the top of the list might be redundant, but I wasn't sure if any of it was necessary for UCS blade info.
I'd recommend a service account for the UCS Manager Credentials section, and it will obviously need at least read access to UCSM. When entering domain credentials, you have to specify the domain, but in the format that the domain is linked in UCSM (refer to the LDAP config in UCSM), AND with "ucs-" in front of it.
So for example, if your active directory domain is mydomain.corporate.realm, and you've added this into UCSM and called it just "ADmydomain", the credential has to be entered as "ucs-ADmydomain\mysvcaccount".
Fun fact, I had issues with the service account at first, so I added the Mgmt node without UCS polling initially, and then added the UCS polling once I resolved the service account problem. (Ended up having to launch UCSM as the service account one time to register the account in UCSM.) Doing this, the Mgmt node never successfully displayed UCS blade info. I deleted the Mgmt node, then re-added it and included the UCS polling as part of the initial node creation. Worked fine that time.
4. Once both FIs are added, you should be able to view the node that UCSM is active on and see the UCS Overview page element (ours showed up in the Network tab by default).
Second Issue: UCS Overview displays the status of each FI, and the names of the enclosures and blades, but the status of the blades doesn't populate.
I'll update this post with the additional steps and more pretty screencaps as we go.
Edit 1: 1/21/2016: Added a best-guess answer to the question of how to add the FIs and UCSM. Raised the second issue of blades not populating.
Edit 2: 8/8/2016: It's been a while, but I'm giving this another go. I think I found a better way of adding the FI's and the Mgmt VIP, so that info has been added.
