B200 M3 to M6 migration

[moulasaleem]

Best practice to migrate service profile of B200 M3 SAN boot servers to new B200 M6 servers without any issues

[Kirk J]

A large chipset jump like that will likely require reinstall of the OS.

Might help if you list what your current B200M3s boot to (i.e. local disk, san lun), what kind of vic card, etc.

Kirk...

[amobrown]

M3 and M6 generation servers cannot coexist in the same UCSM Domain.

B200 M6 has a minimum firmware requirement of 4.2(x) code.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/cisco-ucs-manager-rn-4-2.html#Cisco_Reference.dita_c4bfdd61-9589-44a8-8610-9d66c95b34a0

"Beginning with Cisco UCS Manager Release 4.2(1d), all M3 servers (UCS B22 Blade Server, B200 M3 Blade Server, B420 M3 Blade Server, and all C-Series M3 servers) are no longer supported on all platforms (UCS 6200 Series, 6300 Series, and 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects)."

[jon-alec.morris7]

Hi,

reading this piece, it also says that firmware 4.0 (2) is supported on 4.2. If i have no M6, but an M3 at 4.0(2), does this mean that the UCS will not pick up an M3 at all still?

[Riaan van Niekerk]

> If i have no M6, but an M3 at 4.0(2), does this mean that the UCS will not pick up an M3 at all still?

This is unfortunately correct. We had the same argument/reasoning as you: Because of backwards compatibility / cross version compatibility, we were hoping that we could upgrade only Infra bundle to 4.2 but leave the M3 at 4.1 (latest to support M3). However, the infras bundle upgrade fails as long as you have unsupported components (UCSM upgrades, but it fails at the FI upgrade, then rolls back UCSM to pre-4.2). An M3 will refuse to discover in a domain running 4.2. 

We also had M3s we wanted to upgrade to M6es (and domains from FI-6200 to FI-6400, the latter which also does not support M3). Our upgrade path was:

• Temporary swap out M3 for M4 & M5 (whatever we could spare).
• Upgrade infra firmware to 4.2.
• In-place upgrade FIs from FI-6200 to FI-6400.
• Swap M4 & M5 with M6, changing the SP host firmware package to 4.2 when the SP is disassociated since M6 requires 4.2 as a minimum.

Note: over the past 8-9 years we have never had any issues moving ESXi (ranging 5.0 - 7.0U3) SPs using boot from SAN, from M2/M3/M4/M5 to M3/M4/M5/M6 blades. 

I created this page where I track the UCS firmware versions and which components they add and remove support for (which clearly show which UCS firmware versions de-support M3 and M4):

https://www.reddit.com/r/CiscoUCS/comments/167enqu/cisco_ucs_releases_components_supported_and_ldos/ 

[Walker1]

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@moulasaleem wrote:

Best practice to migrate service profile of B200 M3 SAN boot servers to new B200 M6 servers without any issues

The power button allows you to manually take a server temporarily out of service but leave it in a state where it can be restarted
quickly. If the desired power state for a service profile associated with a blade server is set to "off," using the power button or Cisco
UCS Manager to reset the server will cause the desired power state of the server to become out of sync with the actual power state
and the server may unexpectedly shut down at a later time. To safely reboot a server from a power-down state, use the Boot Server
action in Cisco UCS Manager.

MyCenturaHealth

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