vCentre down after UCS blade firmware upgrade

[robin99]

I have UCS B200M2 blades with following setup:

blade 1 - ESXi 4.1 with primary N1k switch

blade 2 - ESXi 4.1 with backup Nexus 1k switch and vCentre server

I shutdown the blade 2 servers gracefully and then rebooted blade 2 for UCS host firmware upgrade, powered up the blade 2 servers again then the blade 2 ESXi could not get N1k port groups associations. When I looked into networking configuration page, the vSwitch is gone and an error message saying need to have at least 1 physical adapter. Tried to add but unable since they are all used up.

Is this behavior normal? I thought by having primary N1k still running, the vCentre should grab the port group details from that switch no matter how.

I am thinking of doing vMotion in future or having dual vCentre in separate blade but with my current setup has anyone experience the same issue?

any thought would be appreciated.

thanks & regards,

[Robert Burns]

Robin,

If you have multiple ESX hosts, is there any reason you didn't opt to just vMotion all the VMs (including the vCenter) to the other host to fascilitate the upgrade?

When bringing up any virtual interface (for VMs hosted on the 1000v) vCenter has to be online.  If your case, if you didn't power up the vCenter first, and allow it to sync with the VSM, then any Virtual interfaces you try to power up will not come up.

From the description detailed above, where the vmnics and/or vSwitch are missing points to another issue.  Did the vmnic #'s happen to change?  This is normally the only instance where an uplink to a vSwitch or DVS will dissapear.  Which version of UCSM where you upgrade from and to?

Regards,

Robert

[robin99]

Hey Robert,

The other blades are running Cisco UC which do not support vMotion unfortunately.

I did not change the vmnic at all. It is from UCSM 1.43m to 2.01t.

So if I need to shutdown the blades for UCS firmware upgrade, should I do the following sequence of tasks?

1. power down the backup N1k switch and vCentre

2. reboot the blase for host firmware upgrade

3. power up vCentre

4. power up the backup N1k switch

thanks,

Robin