Adding new Blade into 5108 Chassis

[Jean Paul Enerst]

Hi Guys,

               I am about to add a new Blade into the chassis which current having 7 running blades into it.There is also a default template profile ready to create new profile for new blades. Since this is the first time that i am going to add a new blade... I am looking for some guidance. So there is my plan:

1. Insert the new M3 Blade server into a chassis... Noted the chassis number;

2. Go to the profile template, and create profile from template;

3. Go to the new added blade and associate it with the profile create in steps two;

Blade should be ready to boot?

There is where i am not sure, the blade is diskless! we intended to boot from SAN... so where should i have a blade to look for ESXi for the insall? Should i mounted the ESXi image prior then use KVM to tell the server where to get ESXi image to boot?

Thanks,

[Manuel Velasco]

Hi Jean,

steps 1 through 3 are correct the only thing here is to make sure to wait for the UCS to discover the blade before you associate the service profile. You can confirm this from the FSM tab.

Now with respect to boot up question, if you are doing boot from san you need to make sure to zone the wwpns of the service profile for this new blade. To boot the install image, the easies way is like you mentioned "to mounted the ESXi image prior then use KVM to tell the server where to get ESXi image to boot" For this to work your boot order policy must include a CD/DVD ROM

[Jean Paul Enerst]

Thank you so much Manuel for  answering my questions. However, i do neet a bit more clarification on: 'Now with respect to boot up question, if you are doing boot from san you need to make sure to zone the wwpns of the service profile for this new blade' Should not the blade get the WWPN and WWNN from the service profile as well?... Under the SAN tab, i do have one pool for wwnp and one pool for wwnn.

In regards to the boot sequenece, the system is current setup to boot from local disk, and if the fails which it will as there is no disk in the server, then boot from CD-ROOM. So as long as i have ESXi mounted, it should be good to install.

Thanks

[Manuel Velasco]

Hi Jean,

Yes the wwpn get assigned to the vhbas via the wwpn pool or manually depends on your configuration. What I mean by zoning the wwpn is for the SAN switch that is connected to your fabric interconnect so it can talk to the storage.

[Jean Paul Enerst]

Well, i see and thanks again.

From my uderstanding, i should not need to be worry about that as that has been setup since the initial configuration. Afer all my current blade are working fine.

Thanks

[Walter Dey]

If you install ESXi on the local disk, zoning is required, if you would like to see your shared datastore in ESXi, over fibrechannel.

[Jean Paul Enerst]

Thank you guys for these great answer... Really appreciate it.

I have one more question though... I intent is to boot from SAN, the storage team has mentioned that i need to zone the LUNs, so the Blade can see it. Well i assume there is no different than zone the datastore for ESXi hosts, right? For instance:

fcalias name ESX1 vsan 1

    member pwwn 20:00:00:25:b5:b0:00:ff

zone name PCVNX_A5_ESX1 vsan 1

    member fcalias ESX1

    member fcalias PCVNX_A5

Then add the zone above to the zoneset. And lastly, re-activate the zoneset.

Now by reactivate the zoneset, will that affect traffic?

Thanks

[Walter Dey]

If you have 2 vhba, connected to Fabric a, resp. b

you would use this interfaces to access the boot lun, as well as your datastore.

In this case, you would just zone pwwn of vhba-a, with pwwn Controller-a, and similar for vhba-b.

The storage admin would then map e.g. lun nr 0 as boot lun, and lun nr. 1 as datastore.

Just a side remark

1) don't use VSAN nr. 1

2) consider using enhanced zoning, and device-alias, instead of fcalias