In this chapter, we walked through some failure scenarios that are mostly related to connectivity issues or physical components, such as power supplies, fans, or SFP failures. We looked at how to acquire information for troubleshooting and identify failed components or misconfiguration that results in a connectivity failure. We looked into the issues related to network connectivity with northbound port channels. We also looked into complete connectivity, from mezzanine adapters to IOM backplane ports, to IOM fabric ports, to northbound Fabric Interconnect server ports. We also looked into Fibre Channel connectivity issues.

We then looked into a complete Fabric Interconnect or blade server chassis failure. We discovered that as there are redundant parts in both Fabric Interconnects and the chassis, it is very rare that complete equipment will fail. We looked into the most common failures, such as SFPs, power supplies, and fan units. We also looked into IOM connectivity and some possible failure scenarios. We learned about various LEDs on the UCS and how we can use these LED indicators to identify a possible issue with a UCS component.

In the next chapter, we will be looking at the integration of some third-party applications, such as VMware vCenter extension and EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager, and Cisco tools, such as UCS power tools and goUCS.