User Label and Description fields in service profile general tab

[nikthatte]

I have set and changed user labels and descriptions in service profiles before but never noticed anything but this time I looked at the FSM tab and saw power action events. According to the SP FSM it looked like it was rebooting the blade which doesn't make any sense. I launched KVM and confirmed the blade stayed online and pinged it as well and continued to get a response but why did it log the three power events? See below:

Check if power can be allocated to server 1

Waiting for power allocation to server 1

Power-on server sys/rack-unit-1

Cisco's documentation for the Asset Tag field says set the asset tag and manually reboot but doesn't mention anything about the User Label and Description fields. I have added and changed descriptions on multiple things in UCS and never noticed anything. Is doing this a bad idea? Will it cause the blade to reboot?

[Kirk J]

The asset tag is a value that gets pushed to BIOS.

That takes a reboot to actually get applied at BIOS level.

Depending on your user-ack policy, that will require manually acknowledgement for the server in the pending activities area, or can happen immediately if user-ack is set to immediate.

The default is require manual user-ack before reboot.

Kirk...

[nikthatte]

Thanks Kirk but I didnt touch the asset tag field. I only changed the User Label and Description fields. That should not trigger or require a reboot right? 

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

User label definition: Service profiles now have a customer label field that is visible to the operating system or hypervisor running on the server through the SMBIOS asset tag field.

That would also likely take a reboot to push down into BIOS.

Kirk...

[nikthatte]

Oh man, that is a real shame. I didn't get any notifications from UCSM that these changes will require a reboot and there is no pending activity. Just those entries in FSM. I really cannot reboot these hosts as they don't support vmotion at this time. I think I am going to have to open a TAC case for guidance.