Cisco UCS Central: Manual Refresh of Inventory.

We recently had an issue where the power state of several B-Class servers did not match within the server and the service profile view.

The Server view correctly had the power state as Power On.  However, the service profile associated with this server incorrectly showed the Status as Power Off.  There was definitely a disconnect.  Shutting down and powering on the server did not resolve the issue.

To resolve this issue, ssh in the Cisco UCS Central VM:

Once logged in enter the folowing:
connect resource-mgr
scope domain-mgmt
show ucs-domain detail

The last command will give you the ID of the system you would like to perform the refresh on:

Confirm that you are scope'd in on the correct domain by running the following;
scope ucs-domain xxxx
show detail

Once you have confirmed you are in the correct domain, run:
refresh-inventory
commit-buffer

The Commit-buffer command commits the transaction.

 Cisco UCS Central is now syn'd up from Central down to the servers.

Windows Server 2016 pvscsi and vmxnet3 drivers

With the release of the GA version of Windows Server 2016, it's time to start playing!

I spun up a fresh VM using the Paravirtual SCSI Controller (PVSCSI) and a vmxnet3 NIC.  Well, as expected, the PVSCSI controller driver was not included on the Windows Server 2016 ISO.  For this initial VM build, I simply supplied the SCSI controller driver, and once I installed the VMWare tools, the vmxnet3 nic was recognized.

However, I wanted to provide the SCCM team with the necessary VMware drivers to successfully deploy a 2k16 server within VMware if the need arises.

Here are the steps to get the necessary drivers:

Download the appropriate version of VMware-tools-xxx-xxx-x86_64.exe for your environment from the following location:

https://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html

Then run the executable with the /a option.  This will allow you to extract all the driver files.

 Select Next.  Then specify the location you would like the drivers and click Install:

 The drivers will be located in the location specified above:

Now you can provide the SCCM team with the necessary drivers and have them inject them into the WinPE Boot Media.