Physically move a Blade server to another Slot - Best practise?

[Adrian Sutton]

Hi,

Does anyone have a best practise for moving a physical Blade to another slot ?  I cannot seem to find a document about this.

We want to move a blade to another slot due to keeping similar environments grouped together but do not want to disassociate the profile.

Can we just decommission it then pull it out and put in another slot and let it automatically re-commission.  Will the profile stay with the server ?

Do you have to dis-associate the profile then re-associate the profile again ?

Thanks

A

[abbharga]

Hi Adrian,

The best practise to move the blade to another slot is:

1) Shut down the OS running on the blade ,

2) Disassocite the service-profile, wait for the disassociate to complete (check the status on the FSM tab of the blade)

3) Remove the blade from the current slot,

4) Move the blade to the new slot,

5) Wait for the blade to fully discover (again check the status from the FSM tab of the blade)

6) Once discovered associate the profile back

7) Boot the OS back.

The profile is associted to a particular server i.e. chassis id/slot id, hence it is always better to disassociate the profile from the blade and then associate it back.

Hope this helps

./Abhinav

[Adrian Sutton]

Excellent thank you for the prompt reply.  So I don't need to decommission it prior to removing ?

Do you know if this is mentioned in any offical documents?

Thanks

A

[abbharga · Accepted solution]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for poining that out, I guess I wrote too fast.

Yes the decomission is required.

Here are the updated steps:

1) Shut down the OS running on the blade ,

2) Disassocite the service-profile, wait for the  disassociate to complete (check the status on the FSM tab of the blade)

3) Decomission the blade from the UCSM (check the status on the FSM tab for the process)

4)  Remove the blade from the current slot,

5) Move the blade to the  new slot,

6) Wait for the blade to fully discover (again check the  status from the FSM tab of the blade), you might be required to accept / acknowledge the slot to accept the blade and trigger the discovery.

7) Once discovered  associate the profile back

8) Boot the OS back.

Let me check the documents for this and let you know.

./Abhinav

[briantho · Accepted solution]

Make sure before attempting this that you do not have a scrub policy defined for that profile.

[Adrian Sutton]

Yes I can confirm these steps work fine and as Brian mentioned make sure there is no scrub policy prior to un-associating a policy.

Thanks guys

[Kassim Ismail]

Hi,

Would the process/steps mentioned above by Abhinav be the same if i want to move a blade from one chassis to another chassis on another site & which on a different UCS domain?

Thanks

Kass

[Keny Perez]

Kass,

Should be the same except for step 7 where unless you have a Service Profile (created with exactly the same properties) you will need a new Service Profile.

In regards to the OS, as long as the blade is booting from local disk this should be the same, all other steps are fine.

Are you worried about something in specific?

-Rate ALL helpful answers.

Kenny

[Kassim Ismail]

Hi Kenny,

Thanks for the reply.

we already have service profiles created for both blades & are swapping them as one of them have more memory. they are booting from SAN with ESXi.

There isnt anything specific i was concerened about, as i mainly wanted to check the process.

Thanks once again.

[Kassim Ismail]

Hi Kenny,

just re-read your post & wanted to clarifiy the following statement:

"

Should be the same except for step 7 where unless you have a Service Profile (created with exactly the same properties) you will need a new Service Profile.

"

what do you mean by exactly the same properties? both our blades run ESXi & with regards to the number of vHBA's & vNics, they are the same, plus the various policies are similar config but site specific.

should that be fine?

Thanks

[Keny Perez]

Kassim,

Exactly what I meant

If you were going to move this to another slot/chassis in the same domain, all you would need would be to deassociate the service profile and decommision the blade, move it to another slot/chassis, reack the blade and associate the service profile.

In this case, since the blade will be installed in another domain, you might need to create a Service Profile that includes the specific amount of vNICs/vHBAs for the server, but you already did that, so it should be just a matter of :  disassociate/decom, reack/associate.

Good luck!

-Kenny

[Kassim Ismail]

Thanks Kenny.

Thanks for clarifying the process, much appreciated.

Kassim

[Keny Perez]

My pleasure Kassim

-Kenny