New in UCS firmware 1.4 – CIMC Static Management IP assignment

I was told that one of the new features in UCS firmware version 1.4 was that you can now statically assign a CIMC management IP to the blades rather than having the IP randomly assigned from a Management IP Pool you’ve defined.  This definitely deserves a warm welcome as almost all of the clients I’ve worked with who have had B series blades deployed ask if there was a way to static assign the IPs so they match up to the blade slots.  Since I had needed to do a proof of concept with a brand new chassis and blade servers, I started poking around within UCS Manager with firmware version 1.4(1i) to try and find this new feature.  After browsing around for few minutes, I found that to get to the option, you will need to open the the Equipment tab then browse through the nodes: Equipment –> Chassis –> Servers –> Server #.  From there, click on the Inventory tab on the right window then click on the CIMC tab just under it.  Once in this window, you will see the option: Modify Static Management IP.

I haven’t read the new firmware 1.4 manual but what I noticed about this new feature are the following:

1. If you’re going to assign a static IP to the blades, do NOT create a pool with the IP or IPs you would like to assign because as soon as you create a Management IP Pool UCS will automatically assign it to a blade server and that IP or IPs will almost always never been sequential respective to the blades.  In the case when I created an IP pool with 1 IP, it was immediately assigned to blade 2. 

If you try to assign an IP that’s already assigned, you will receive the following:

MSG_USE_STATIC_FAIL

address is already assigned to sys/chassis-2/blade-#/mgmt/ipv4-pooled-addr

2. If you would like to assign a static IP to your blade servers, it would be best to first assign the IP to each blade:

Then proceed with creating a pool that includes that IP:

Noticed how the Assigned heading notes that 172.20.5.179 is Yes?

You might be wondering why I even chose to create a pool after assigning the static IP and my reasoning is because how else would you be able to keep track of what IPs you’ve used?  Again, I haven’t read the new administration guide so maybe there’s a view to review all the management IPs for each blade but all I found was this which did not appear to include a column for the management IP assigned to the blades: