will discovery of a B200 M5 4.0.x on 6200 FIs running 3.2.3k work?

[nikthatte]

I have to deploy four B200 M5 blades in a domain with 6248 FIs running 3.2.3k. I have to deploy them as Vm hosts running esxi 6.7 u3. Going by the Cisco HCL, I will need to upgrade my FIs to 4.0.x minimum which I plan to do but I have to wait until we retire a few M2 blades we have in production. 

So I am hoping I can just discover my M5 blades running 4.0.x on the FIs and in 6-8 weeks upgrade the FIs. Either that, or downgrade the M5's some how after they are installed in the chassis.

Has anyone had to do this before? UCS firmware is so tricky it is hard to even do high level planning on the fly.

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Greetings.

The cross firmware support matrix in the release notes covers this area.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/release/notes/CiscoUCSManager-RN-4-0.html#concept_rlp_4h2_zdb

What you are proposing is not supported.

Will it 'work' maybe, but calling into TAC if something isn't behaving as expected is going to get you pointed to this supported matrix ;)

They will probably discover... If you get partial discovery, you may want to manually downgrade the CIMC, BIOS, adapter firmware, to match the 3.23k version you have.  Assuming discovery then completes, you can then let a hostfirmware policy push the complete 3.23 firmware package to them.

Kirk...

[nikthatte]

Thanks Kirk, the downgrade is what I will do.