Upgrading ESXi 5.1 drivers when using Cisco UCS Blade Servers

[Viewaskew]

Hi, Im pretty new to Cisco blades with regards to maintaining and upgrading ESXi when using them but have a question about maintaining the Cisco driver versions.

The way I see it is that I build the blades with the Cisco Customized ISO of ESXi , say for example 5.1 U2 which contains the specific drivers for Cisco UCS servers. Subsequent patches come out from VMware and are applied but these contain generic driver updates say for megaraid_sas controllers etc.

If I want to keep ESXi updated with the most current Cisco drivers I have to download them from Cisco and install them separately to the VMware issued updates right? I find that its difficult to ensure I haven’t missed any driver updates from Cisco doing it this way. One way I assume is to wait for the next major Cisco Custom ISO to be released and perform an upgrade of ESXi on all the hosts, this way all the latest Cisco drivers are applied and nothing is missed.

Does anyone else follow an upgrade process like this or do you have a simpler way to perform driver updates in-between major update releases and corresponding custom ISOs?

Thanks for any advice

[reub]

The "safest" way for you may just be to download the Cisco customised ISO images, as these contain all the required drivers out of the box.  Cisco are a bit tardy at releasing their ESXi images, but they will provide you with a totally functional ESXi installation without having to update anything else afterwards.

There isn't much in so far as drivers that you need to worry about, the VIC cards are the main ones as they are Cisco specific.  Most of the other components of UCS are generic components, ie LSI Megaraid Cards, Intel x520, Intel i350 all of which have good Inbox (built in) ESXi drivers.

I've just updated my C220M3 UCS server with the vanilla 6.0 GA ISO images and the only thing I have had to add is the LSI Megaraid CIM driver, to give better visibility of the health RAID card.  But again, that's not Cisco specific...