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Brandon Pierce
Level 4
Level 4

Over the last few weeks I have been dealing with a faulty SD card in a UCS C220 box.  This isn't something most people have to interface with and is usually not even known that they can be put in the C220s unless they review the inventory list from a purchase order.  Since there is documentation on this process, I felt it necessary to provide more documentation on my personal experience with replacing the card, it's location with a picture and not a diagram, as well as the end result of what it should look like on the CIMC when complete.

 

Starting off, you need to gracefully shutdown all VMs(Virtual Machines) on the C220 during a period you set for a planned outage if you do not have a subscriber.  I would still recommend doing this during off hours in the event something unfortunate should happen while the VMs are shut down.  Make sure in vSphere or vCenter you set the VMs to not "auto start" as you will most likely need to configure the SD cards using the SCU utility.  This SCU utility lets you set the all the partitions and whatever else you may need to do.  Additionally, you will need to gracefully shutdown the C220 and not just slam it by pressing the power button.  There are different ways of doing this, but I prefer to do everything through the CIMC as I can remain connected and watch the status.

 

The below image is a screen capture of the CIMC and how to shut it down gracefully. 

Always use the "Shut Down Server" for a graceful shutdown.  This ensures you arn't slamming ESXi.  Once this is complete, all VMs are officially off and so is the UCS C220, you can slide the server out and pull the cover off.  Remove all cables such as the power and ethernet At the back of the server is a screw that you have to loosen before you can press the thumb buttons and slide the cover off.  If you don't loosen that back middle screw you will not get the cover off and could end up damaging something, so please ensure you loose the screw!

 

So by now you have the cover off and are looking at the the internals of the C220.  The place to looks for the SD cards is towards the front of the server.  There are two slots, sometimes they are empty, sometimes there is only one, and sometimes there are two of them (recommended).  You simply slide these out of their slots and replace them with the new SD card or, if doing a new install, put the new ones in the slots.  If you are using one SD card only use Slot 1 to keep things tidy.  See below for images:

One more image:

Once you install the SD cards put the cover back on, reconnect all cables, and then power the server back on.  Verify that all your VMs are running and that ESXi is fine.   From here, check your CIMC to verify that the SD cards are indeed being seen.  This screen will vary from version to version so I won't post a screenshot here.  All you have to do is go into the CIMC, go to the Storage menu, and check the FlexFlash.  It will say one of two things if the SD cards are seen. 

  1. RAID
  2. RAID Degraded

If the SD cards report faulted in anyway, reseat the cards using the process we already went over.  If the issue does not go away, you will need a TAC case from Cisco for further help and maybe an RMA.  I hope this has been informative and if any errors are present please let me know.  This was done purely impromptu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Brandon,

Really good post. Thanks for sharing. Very well explained.

Regards

Lavanya

CSC Moderator

Amit Singh
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Great Post Brandon, It saved me a RMA. 

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