Port Mapping 6120 to 6248 FI Upgrade

[peter.robertson]

I am planning the upgrade for our 6120XP FIs to be replaced with 6248s.  I have the read the upgrade guide and need a little clarification.  In our 6120s we are utilizing the N10-E0060 FC expansion slot for storage connectivity.   We are not utilizing an expansion module with our 6248s as the 32 fixed universal ports provide sufficient port capacity for our environment.

The upgrade guide refers to mapping slot 2 ports on the 6120 to slot 2 on the 6248.  How do I proceed with the upgrade process without slot 2?  Will the 6248 automatically detect the FC SFPs in the higher order fixed ports and divide the slot 1 ports into Ethernet and FC pools automatically?  Or do I need to manually specify the division between Ethernet and FC?    I am also assuming that manual remapping will be necessary as I will be changing from 2/X ports to 1/X ports?

Thanks!

[chrisb2 · Accepted solution]

You will need to manually specify which ports to use for fiber channel using the unified port wizard (accessed on the main page of the FI under the equipment tab. Once you have configured the unified ports (which will require a reboot) you will just need to configure the new fc ports the same way as your old ones.

[Jeremy Waldrop · Accepted solution]

In line with what Chris stated about the unified port wizard. The FC port/Ethernet ports must be contiguous, what I mean by this is that you can't make ports 1/12-13 FC and then make ports 1/14-5 Ethernet. Best practice is to start at the right and work to the left for the FC ports. I usually make at least ports 1/29-32 FC, this will give you 4 FC ports, for larger environments I would do 6. You must do this on each Fabric Interconnect but only do 1 at at time. As soon as you hit finish on the unified port tool the FI will reboot.

If you had the optional expansion module and you changed some of those ports to be FC then only the expansion module would get reset instead of a switch reboot.

I did a blog post on this subject last year - http://jeremywaldrop.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/cisco-ucs-6248-unified-port-configuration/

[peter.robertson]

Thanks Christopher and Jeremy.  Just to confirm:  I follow the upgrade process, swapping out the subordinate 6120 for the 6248, conencting the L1/L2 HA cabling and M1 port, power it up and configure it as the subordinate interconnect in the cluster and then through UCSM configure the unified ports and remap the FC?

[chrisb2]

That's correct.  The only thing I would do in addition to that is power up the 6248 in standalone and verify that it is running the correct version of code before clustering it up.

While configuring the secondary's fc/eth connectivity interfaces pinned to that side will be down and the primary will be providing all connectivity.  Once you've configured the new FI then those errors will go away.

[Jeremy Waldrop]

Also I wouldn't enable the server ports until you get the LAN/SAN uplinks up on the 6248.