Cisco 200 M4 to B200 M5 Upgrade

[viby]

We are planning to decom some of our B200 M4's and the plan is to replace them with B200 M5's.

B200-M4 servers are running on SAN boot. 

vNICs and vHBA are configured in service profile on existing B200 M4:

- For Vmware (Per Blade): 2x vHBA & 4 vNICs

- Both are using the same Cisco UCS VIC 1340(UCSB-MLOM-40G-03)

The plan is to disassociate the current M4 blade from the service profile and then associate a M5 blade to the same service profile.

Since the VMware hypervisor is running on a SANBoot volume, and the service profile has the old HBA WWPN's, the service profile should boot normally without any issues.

Are there any issues with this method of blade upgrades? Is there any reason we should create a fresh new service profile?

[Steven Tardy]

Many customer do this change without issue.

I imagine if you asked VMware support they would say it is not supported going from Broadwell/Haswell CPUs to Skylake/Cascade-lake CPUs.

I don't know one way or the other if this is officially supported or not.
Personally I would re-install and reconfigure the Hypervisor/VMware-ESXi.
But if you didn't do the install, then that may seem daunting and more-trouble-than-it-is-worth.

[Riaan van Niekerk]

In the past 10 years we have done this switch

• on hundreds of servers,
• M2 -> M3 -> M4 -> M5 -> M6
• Sometimes sequentially, sometimes jumping 1 or more generations
• Often different VIC models

and have never had an issue. As long as firmware and fnic drivers are in line with the HCL, you should be fine and supported.

With regards to "is not supported going from Broadwell/Haswell CPUs to Skylake/Cascade-lake CPUs.", if you have EVC enabled on the cluster, that will prevent any potential VM to host compatibility issues until all your SPs in a cluster have been swapped out, after which you can (optionally) increase the EVC mode.

[viby]

Thanks for the quick responses. 

The EVC mode is enabled and the Hosts with the following processor types will be permitted to enter the cluster:
Intel® "Haswell" Generation
Intel® "Broadwell" Generation
Intel® "Skylake" Generation
Future Intel® processors