Change boot device from SDCard to internal storage

[jn242]

If you currently have and Updating SPT that runs all your b series servers, can you clone it and use the new cloned SPT.....change its boot policy and switch from the current boot device to a new boot device without all the servers getting new WWPNs and having to rezone everything over again? WE are looking for a simple way to migrate to internal storage on our the blades vs booting from SD Card and being able to swing them over one at a time.

Does changing your SPT change your wwpns so you have to rezone our fiber.

[Wes Austin]

All you would need to do is change the service profile template to the new boot policy.

Just unbind all the servers you dont want to change the boot policy from the updating SPT. Then change the SPT to the new boot policy. Then bind one server back at a time to the updating service profile template. They will get the new boot policy and you can configure one at a time.

Once complete, all SP will be bound back to the updating SPT and you will have new boot policy. 

[jn242]

Thanks. That sounds easy enough.

Just so i understand.....

The process of unbinding the current servers from the current Updating SPT will be ok to do and not require a reboot or change the current servers in any way....meaning it wont cause issues to the current config and the servers will continue to run as they are currently? 

Then once all servers are unbound from the updating template, update the updating templates boot policy as needed and then bind it back to each server 1 at at time....configuring each server 1 at at time until finished?  (and this will keep the wwpns on the hbas rezoning isnt needed). 

[Wes Austin]

Unbinding the service profile from the template will not cause a reboot. Best practice is to ensure your maintenance policy is set to User-Ack, that way in case there is a reboot that is set to occur, you will need to acknowledge it.

Yes, this should keep the WWPN the same and will not require you to re-zone, etc. You will need to ensure your boot policy has the correct target LUN ID and WWPN for primary and secondary HBA paths to storage.

[jn242]

Thank you. WE are wanting to change from booting from SD card which is out boot policy now. We will be inserting newly purchased SSD drives into all our blades  and really just want to reload/restore our Vmware ESXi instance onto the SSD drives which we can do by reloading the OS on the SSD drives and restoring the Vmware ESXi backups to restore the config. At that point we shoudl be booting from the SSD drives per the new boot policy. WE will probably leave the old SD cards in the servers for now. NO real reason to remove them. We want to make sure we can move over to internal SSD local storage to make sure we can upgrade to ESXi7+ as they no longer support SD Cards in the future. 

[jn242]

Would it also be suitable to clone the existing service profile template and update the boot and local disk policies on the cloned SPT and then bind one server at a time to the newly cloned template to be able to do one at a time?

If this would work must you also "unbind" from template before binding the server to the newly cloned one? It seems as if i can just click "bind to a template" and change the template directly without first unbinding it. 

Again my goal with all this is to get a new boot policy / local disk policy and migrate away from sd card boot in esxi.  IM hoping to just restore esx directly back to the new internal storage and not have to treat each server as a "new server" which would get new storage WWPNs and that sort of thing.