Updating Firmware for Cisco UCS C Series Servers with Cisco UCS Host Upgrade Utility

As some of you may have come across one of my previous posts earlier in the year:

Updating Cisco UCS C-Series server’s firmware with Cisco UCS Server Standalone Utilities
http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2011/01/updating-cisco-ucs-c-series-servers.html

… since it’s been quite some time since I’ve written another post for upgrading Cisco’s C series servers’ firmware, I took the time to do a few screenshots while upgrading 4 C460s a month ago so this post serves to show what the process looks like.

Proceed with downloading the Host Upgrade Utility ISO from the Cisco site:

hostUpgrade_v1_3_2i.iso
Release Date: 21/JUN/2011
Cisco UCS Host Upgrade Utility
Size: 109364.00 KB (111988736 bytes)

You can either burn the ISO onto a CD to boot with it or use the CIMC to mount the ISO so that the server can boot into the Linux OS that handles the firmware upgrade:

Once you’ve accepted the EULA, you’ll be presented with the following prompt with the options to:

1. Update CIMC Firmware
2. Update BIOS
3. Update LOM Firmware
4. Update LSI Firmware
5. Update UCS P81E VIC
6. All the above

Unless you have a reason to update only certain components, I would select option #6 to update all of the components:

The firmware update process will begin once you’ve entered your choice into the prompt and the first component the Host Upgrade Utility updates is the CIMC:

Then the BIOS:

Then the NICs:

Then the RAID controller:

… and finally the Palo card if it is installed:

Once the process finishes, continue by rebooting the server with option #7:

… and we’re done.  There’s not a whole lot to upgrading the firmware but I hope this post gives an idea of what it looks like.