UCS FI Cluster to FI standalone?

[SIMMN]

Long story short, one of my customers wants to move from a pair of FI6200 with one chassis of blades to a new single FI6400…Not IMM. Each blade is running VMware ESXi with Boot from SAN.

I am not aware of any way to migrate the profiles and existing ESXi hosts in this scenario other than reconfiguration from scratch on the new FI6400 as standalone. The configuration should not be an issue but I worry about the existing hosts. If I ack and apply the profile on the new FI, Will that force to redo the ESXi OS?

The VMs are on the FC SAN.

[balaji.bandi]

as per i know you need to start configuring from scratch.

[SIMMN]

Yeah, reconfiguring should not be an issue. I worry the ESXi hosts might also need to be re-installed. Hope someone could help confirm.

[Wes Austin]

If the ESXi hypervisor is on the SAN, you just point the blades to it once you move to standalone mode. Nothing should change from the SAN disk side.

[RedNectar]

Hi @SIMMN ,

You didn't say, but I'm assuming the ESXi hosts have some local storage for a boot image, and boot off that.

Neither did you say if these are B-Series Chassis servers or C-Series stand alone.

And finally, you didn't say if the new FI6400 was to be managed in UCSM managed mode or Intersight Managed Mode (IMM)

You did say that all the VMs are on a FC SAN.

So when you take one of the ESXi hosts out of service, the worst that can happen is that when you've reconfigured it, you'll need to re-install the ESXi image, which doesn't really loose any data.

Now if they are C-Series, you should be able to migrate one server at a time. If we are talking about B-Series, it will need to be a chassis at a time.

But having said that, if the image is on the local disk, and you've rebuilt the Service Profiles (or Server Profiles if IMM) then when the profiles are applied, the servers should reboot just fine, BUT any vNICs configured for redundancy will now be screwed up because they have only one FI to connect to. So there will be some reconfiguring that will have to be done to sort that out.

At the end of the day, I really think it will be easier to re-configure the new FI from scratch anyway. ESPECIALLY if it is to be in IMM mode.  You could actually re-build the a Service/Server¹ Profile Template on the new FI before even moving the first ESXi.

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1. UCSM Service Profiles and Service Profile Templates are now called Server Profiles and Server Profile Templates in IMM

[SIMMN]

@RedNectar  As always, thanks for the detailed information! I have updated the post with additional information.

I do not mind getting the UCS configuration re-done from scratch and I can re-adjust the vNICs. But mainly concerned about the ESXi OS and VM data during the "migration" since all blades within the chassis would be migrated at once. The boot from SAN for ESXi should be okey I think as far as I use the same WWPNs for the hosts with the same targets. I am not too sure about the VM data though...OR if the hosts would still be able to see the same data stores afterwards... 

[RedNectar]

Hi @SIMMN ,

Re: 

I am not too sure about the VM data though...OR if the hosts would still be able to see the same data stores afterwards

The only issue is whether some/all of the ESXi hosts are using local disks as data stores for the VMware environment.  But even then, if the Service Profiles are built modelled on the old ones, the local storage should come up just fine and there would be no problem. 

The are I see the most likely to cause a problem is in the ESXi vSwitch configuration, which in the dual FI environment probably had two uplinks per vSwitch - one to FI-A and one to FI-B.  In the new environment, you'll probably find it easiest to leave the number of vNICs the same, and configure the ESXi hosts to still have two uplinks per vSwitch - just both to FI-A now.