Hi All,
We are looking to upgrade our Nexus 7k infrastructure as our current line cards are going/gone End Of Life. We will be replacing M1 cards we either M2 or F2 that were purchased sometime ago. Sounds like an easy task until you consider the vPC dependencies on each chassis. i believe that for vPC to work, the Cisco recommendation is that bother switches in the vPC domain, have the same line cards being used for vPC keep-alive, Peer-link & members. So im thinking i should migrate the vPC Keep-alive, followed by the peer link, and then the vPC & orphan ports (although some will be on shared cards).
I've been handed a Cisco doc from back in 2012 that describes this and the steps for the vPC link are as follows:
- Start with M1==M1 based vPC peer Link
- Shut the M1 peer link PO on primary – traffic flows thru primary & secondary vpc ports will come down
- Shut and remove M1 Ethernet interfaces from VPC PL PO and add M2 interfaces on VPC PL PO on secondary
- No shut the VPC PL PO & M2 interfaces on secondary
- Repeat the two steps above for primary and bring the M2 based PL up
- Let the traffic converge fully before starting to migrate the VPC member ports going to access switches from M1 to M2 ( this step is optional and only needed if desired )
What id like to understand better is what should i expect to see when i bring the secondary switch Peer-link up on the M2 Card, as the primary will still be on M1 at this time? The ports will have been suspended when the primary vPC link is shutdown, so id assume i have to manually re-open all the vPC member ports, but how will this work as the Cisco recommendation is to have matching line cards on both switches? Has anyone actually done this?
Has anyone got experience of doing this with minimal downtime? we do not have the luxury of powering off the entire chassis.
