Adding B200 M5 expander cards

[flamegri11ed]

B200 M5 chassis only 4 x blades.

3 older M5's  in production 

1 new M5 is currently being installed with expander card installed(no discovery issues) atm ESXi installed

Proposed procedure :

1. I put the ESXi host into maintenance mode and shut down.

2. Disassociate the Server Profile. Is this necessary if I am to use the same Service Profile or is it safer the disassociate?

What is done at this stage? Not sure about the process. Do I continue to the 3rd point?

3. Remove the blade.

4. Add the expander card.

5. Add to existing slot

What is done at this stage?

6. I am assuming it will grab its own Service Profile and boot

7. When do I reacknowledge the blade? Do I decommission the blade at some stage?

I am not sure about adding new hardware what the process is?

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Wes Austin · Accepted solution]

After you put the host in maintenance mode and shut it down, you should do a decommission from the UCSM side. This will remove the service profile for you. Then physically remove, add the expansion card and re-install. then you will re-ack and UCSM will discover the server with the new hardware and re-apply the service profile.

[flamegri11ed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Wes Austin,

Thank you again for the support. The blade sequence/steps process ran as you said it would . Vmware-Maintenance mode-Shutdown blade. Executed the Server Maintenance/Decommission command. I was not sure when to pull the blade from the slot. I had to refresh by selecting another blade and then returning to the decommissioned blade to receive the prompt to reacknowledge the slot. The decommissioned blade was removed from the slot. Added the MLOM expander card. I waited for the reacknowledge prompt(greyed) to appear and issued the reacknowledge command. Blade ran config and booted Made sure all servers were in the UCS server pool. Checked the vswitch NIC changes from 20gb to 40gb. Exited from maintenance mode. All was good on all 3 blade changes.