Copying a Service Profile to a new one for editing and using with the same Windows OS

[rumak18]

Hi there,

i'm trying to add some vNICs to an existend service profile for my  Hyper-V 2012R2 servers. My steps look theretically like this:

1. Copy existing "service profile" with a new name for the new service profile.

2. Edit the new service profile (added two vnics)

3. Shutdown the server; Disassociate the old profile from server

4. Associate new profile to server ; Boot.

So my questions are...do i have to copy the UUID,WWPNs (FC adapter) and MAC adresses from the old profile to the new one? Is this necessary or can i just use the new one so that the same Windows OS image can be used with without any issues in Hyper-V with Fibre Channel and Ethernet connection?

[mojafri]

Hi, 

Plan looks good, however since you are cloning the Service-profile, if will have new UUID,WWPNs and MAC which will be fetched from pool(MAC,UUID,WWNs) you are using in old service-profile. You also need to make sure you should have at least one mac,uuid,wwns available for 1 new service-profile. 

Further, since its going to be new wwns, you have to take care of zoning as well. 

Please rate if you find it helpful.

Regards,

MJ

[rumak18]

@mojafri

Further, since its going to be new wwns, you have to take care of zoning as well. 

-> Here comes the first one ... what do you mean with "zoning"?

And i did not get your anwer to my question. Do i have to copy the UUID,WWPNs and MAC adress to the new profile when i want to use the new profile with the same server as before?

@

[mojafri]

Hi,

 Here comes the first one ... what do you mean with "zoning"? Kinda of ACL in Ethernet world, similarly we have zoning in SAN world. Allows Initiator (server/host) to talk to target(storage box).

And i did not get your anwer to my question. Do i have to copy the UUID,WWPNs and MAC adress to the new profile when i want to use the new profile with the same server as before? You don't have to copy anything except cloning a old service-profile. Rest all automatically gets assigned in SP picked from pool as mentioned earlier.

Regards,

MJ

[Niko Nikas]

Hello,

Looking at your steps below, is there a reason you are not simply adding the new vNICs to the original profile?

That way you won't have to unassociate/re-associate, and the MACs/WWPNs for the original virtual interfaces all remain the same.

Assuming we can't do the above...

Do I have to copy the identifiers from the old profile to the new one?

Likely not, although you will want to be careful when adjusting any FC WWPN, as you will likely lose connectivity to storage until your SAN is reconfigured.

--

Niko

[rumak18]

@Niko Nikas

Hi,

the reason i'm putting the new vnics to a new service profile is because i'm new to UCS and i'm afraid of crashing the old (original) one. Furthermore as far as i've seen i have to shut down the server for the process of editing an active (associated) service profile.

The SAN is not the case i'm afraid of because i know that i have to care of access for the hosts with WWPN.

The problematic case is Hyper-V...i just don't know how the hypervisor will behave when getting new MACs,WWPN and even a new UUID for the same (Windows Server) image (booted from SAN).

[Niko Nikas · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Windows should be able to tolerate adding two new vNICs.

It's very similar to simply installing another new physical NIC in a traditional 'pizza box' style server.

However, as you noted, adding vNICs will require that the service profile be rebooted for the changes to be reflected.

--

Niko