UCS manager upgrade

[opnineopnine]

Hi all,

I have my UCS manager and I need to make an upgrade, my questions is the VMs I have running do I need to move them from one device to other? or I can do the upgrade with no down time? 

Can anyone give me a procedure about how I have to do this?

thanks all.

[Justin Welch · Accepted solution]

Hello,

An upgrade is usually done in two parts:

1) the infrastructure (IOMs, UCSM, Fabric interconnects)

2) the blades (BIOS, Adapters, CIMC, Board Controller, Flexflash, etc)

During the infrastructure upgrade you will need to reboot the fabric interconnects one at a time. When you do this one of your two fabrics will be down for roughly 20 minutes. If you have redundant vNICs/vHBAs across your A and B fabrics this should only cause degraded services in the environment. However, a maintenance window is still advised. When you upgrade the blades you will need to reboot. This is most likely where you will need to move your VMs around. After you upgrade the blades make sure to update your OS drivers as well!

UCS firmware upgrade steps:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/products-installation-guides-list.html

Firmware download:

https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=283853163&flowid=25821&softwareid=283655681&release=2.2%285b%29&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest

Compatibility matrix:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/unified-computing-system/products-technical-reference-list.html

Hope this helps.

Justin

[opnineopnine]

Hello Justin,

Thanks for the great doc, I only have one more question, how do I move the vms?

thanks. 

[Justin Welch]

Hello,

That is going to depend on what hypervisor you are using and the licensing you have installed. In example, if you are using ESXi and have a vCenter server with the correct licensing you can vMotion the VMs off the host to a different one. If you do not have a vCenter server ESXi does not offer that kind of redundancy so you may need to shut your VMs down entirely.

Given that I'm not familiar with your environment I would encourage you to speak more with the OS vendor for recommended steps to move your VMs.

Thanks,

Justin