Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC)

Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) is a controller embedded in the system board of a Cisco UCS server that is used for initial configuration (management interface), remote access, and management of Cisco UCS C Series (rackmount) servers.

Description

. CIMC controller is a modern and free solution for remote access to Cisco servers, realized on the basis of IPMI card. CIMC supports several popular access and management interfaces: web interface, CLI – command line, and XML API.

The controller “understands” SNMP v3, Redfish v1.01, and is equipped with IPMI v2 interface for accessing and configuring the server platform.

Among the key features of the Cisco Integrated Management Controller are the following:

• support for a variety of access and configuration interfaces, which also includes an XML API that supports WebUI, Microsoft Windows PowerShell, and Python SDK;
• CIMC can handle SNMP v2 and v3 protocols with built-in IPMI and MIB;
• CIMC can perform online firmware upgrades (BIOS, Out-of-band upgrade, Cisco IMC and Cisco UCS VIC), support for automated multi-system upgrades for RAID and LOM, the upgrade process itself is simple and reliable;
• the ability to use the vBoot solution with fine-tuning the parameters of boot devices, and there is support for one-time boot.

Pros of Cisco Integrated Management Controller

Among all the positive aspects of CIMC, the following are worth mentioning:

• the controller supports the work with built-in diagnostic tools that allow you to quickly identify problems, which significantly increases the level of system availability;
• CICM has an out-of-band RAID configuration wizard that allows you to configure RAID devices on local media;
• supports Cisco UCS VIC interface cards directly, allows you to configure Ethernet and FCoE (nic, fnic) endpoint network interfaces for LAN (L2 layer) / SAN connections without having to boot the operating system;

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