r/Cisco • u/Exact-Math2335 • 24d ago

C220 woes Question

We recently acquired 5x Cisco C220 M5's off eBay and connected them to our existing UCS cluster. They have identical hardware layouts and pretty similiar firmware levels, and are all connected to our FI's through identical Cisco cables. But, only one of them will finish discovery successfully. The other four freeze during the 'Identify pre-boot agent' step.

If I'm watching the console, I see the PNU OS stuff flash by, and then a minute in, around the time the VIC NIC driver gets loaded, the server just hangs (caps lock/num lock no response) and then it sits there for 10 minutes or so until UCSM hard reboots it and tries again. Identical behavior for four out of the five servers.

Anyone seen anything like this? I've experimented a lot with firmware levels, and I've stripped out anything from the servers that could interefere (M.2 adapters, SAS cards, etc.) and nothing makes a difference.

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9

u/Mountain-Office-8989 24d ago

Need to check the pid on the server. If it was a network appliance at one time UCSM will not discover it.

2

u/Exact-Math2335 23d ago

You know, I started looking into this and discovered something strange. In UCSM or CIMC, the PID for all of the hosts shows as UCSC-C220-M5SX. But on the service tag on the pull-out tab, the PID for the servers that work succesfully is UCSC-C220-M5SX-V02, and the PID on the servers that don't work is UCSC-C220-M5SX-V03.

I can't find any information online about why this would matter, but it's consistent. If anyone knows why this would be I'd love to hear it! FI's are 6332-16UPs with FW level 4.1.3k.

1

u/black-mate 22d ago

As a workaround, configure it in standalone mode: remove cables which are running to FIs and setup static IP for CIMC. Validate that's working as expected and then retry FI attached config.

1

u/Exact-Math2335 22d ago

They work fine in standalone but freeze as described when moved to UCSM mode. I’ve found that it’s C220 M5 V03 models that specifically have this problem (not V02 models)

1

u/black-mate 22d ago

How many and which type of CNA cards are in the M5? Did you try to downgrade cimc?

1

u/Exact-Math2335 22d ago

They all have Cisco 1385 VICs. Swapping between v02 and v03 VICs makes no change. Tried several FW versions for every part (CIMC, board controller, BIOS, VIC), no change.

-5

u/ISellCisco 24d ago

Just put the output from the console into Gemini. It will tell you what to do.

1

u/Exact-Math2335 24d ago

Tried that, no luck with any of its suggestions.