In this chapter, we'll learn how to back up and restore the UCS configuration. There are multiple UCS backup options which can be used either in disaster recovery scenarios to fully restore the Fabric Interconnects configuration and state to export the UCS configuration data to be imported to the same, or a different system. UCS configuration backups are in XML format and hence can be easily modified if required. We'll show different backup options and walk through creating and importing backup jobs from both the GUI and the command line.
In the second half of the chapter, we will learn about the Fabric Interconnect high availability feature. This feature is for control plane functions only. From the data plane perspective, every component is redundant providing multiple data paths. Fabric Interconnects actively participate in data flow and fabric failover can be configured at the vNICs level. For the control plane, one Fabric Interconnect is configured as primary and the other as secondary in a cluster. Most of the high availability configuration is possible from the GUI but there are some configurations and details which are only available through CLI. We will take a look into both GUI and CLI, for backup and high availability.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Backing up the Cisco UCS configuration
- Creating UCS backup jobs
- Restoring backups using GUI
- Configuring high availability clustering
- Fabric Interconnect elections
- Managing high availability