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OK folks first of all apologies for asking what is probably a stupid question with a simple answer but i can NOT figure this out.

About a year ago i took a new position at a company with a small datacenter presence. The DC stuff amounts to a disk array and a Cisco UCS 5108 AC2 chassis with 6 B200 M4 blades. We run VMWare on this setup, ESXi 5.5 . Yes, it is very old; i am migrating to AWS so please don't throw shade :-)

Anyway, i manage VMWare from vCenter running on a Windows box running 2012 R2 Standard. And my problem is this: i don't know where the f*ck this Windows box is.

  • There are no Windows VMs in vCenter.
  • There are no VMs running "directly on the Cisco UCS".
  • There are no other compute resources in our racks (e.g. no little 1U pizza box running around anywhere)

i am not at the DC but i have had the remote hands guys take pictures of our 2 racks and all the gear is present and accounted for in my inventory spreadsheet.

FWIW the IP address of the Windows box is a private IP in our range. And when I RDP into the box and run Device Manager i see that the CPU model and series match the CPUs on all the blades. So this tells me the Windows box does in fact run somewhere on the UCS. But like i said, i can't find it either in vCenter or the UCS manager software.

Is there some mystery management station or supervisory function of the UCS that i don't know about?

godot
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1 Answers1

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Remote hands at the datacenter actually figured it out for me. Turns out we have a Cisco c220m3 1U server sitting right on top of the UCS chassis. I didn't even know Cisco made pizza-box servers! Anyway, looking at it from the front it is hard to tell that it is a separate piece of hardware from the UCS chassis. From the back it's obviously shorter, but there are a bunch of cables piled up back there so I couldn't see that from the pics I have.

Anyway, problem solved. I can now attach some USB SSDs and back this thing up. For the first time in its existence xD

Dave M
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godot
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