As a result of architectural changes and memory DIMM errors, there is a difference in which
errors will be corrected between the previous generation of processors and the Xeon Scalable
Processor Family generation. This may result in rising DIMM errors being seen on your server.
The components affected are Cisco UCS M5 platforms. The products affected are as listed
here, and the release certification matrix -the rcms affected- are listed as well. To verify if
you're... what your current settings and your server types are you can use the GUI or CLI.
If using the UCS Manager GUI then point the browser at the IP address of your USC Manager
and log in as user 'admin' and customer supplied password. On the left hand side of the UCS manager
you can see your equipment. Under equipment you can choose chassis and from there you will see all
of the chassis' listed on the right hand side with the servers on each chassis also listed. If you
expand the name of the servers then you can see each server is numbered per chassis. Double click
on the server and it will take you into a hardware view, and also from the menu you can choose the
installed firmware for that particular server. There you can see what the current BIOS setting
is, and you can also see this is an M4 server with the package version on it. You can also get
this through 'inventory' and 'motherboard'. Under 'inventory' and 'motherboard' you can go into the
file settings and see what your current advanced memory settings are set to. Under advanced you
go to 'RAS Memory' and under there you can see the memory RAS config is set to 'maximum performance',
which was the default up until this new and improved firmware version for M5 servers.
You could also get this information via CLI. If you log in via PuTTY. Here you can also see
the show serv server if you double tag then you can see all options available to you,
and from here the show server inventory will show us the same information for the service
that we just saw through the GUI. Again you can see these are M3 series and M4 series servers.
And listed here also, the show server version will give you the firmware information,
as shown here, so that lists it per server
and it also gives you the BIOS information and the package version and the current status.
It's pretty much the same information that we just saw through the GUI. If you like you can
drill down into each individual server as well so scope server the one, one which is one we're
looking at in the GUI, and from there you can drill down into the BIOS and the BIOS settings.
And in the BIOS settings we can check the current setting in memory RAS configuration
settings as well. To update these, if you had an M5 server to update you need to update the
firmware and the memory error setting default is ADDDC Sparing for the new version of the firmware.
As seen in the previous demo earlier releases had memory configuration set to maximum performance.
For Cisco M5 series servers we recommend to upgrade to the UCS version to 4.13b or later.
For this release and later default memory configuration is set to adaptive double
device data correction which is ADDDC Sparing. This tracks correctable memory
errors and dynamically maps out failing regions by pulling those banks and ranks into virtual
lockstep mode. The RCM releases which support this are listed here.
Thank you for watching.