Server Pools - two questions

Mike Erter · ‎01-10-2013

Hi UCS Community,

Curious about use cases for Server Pools. They seem to be suited for quite large UCS installations with tens or hundreds of chassis and blades. Is this the case?

We have blades in Server Pools and because of this we can't do something as trivial as adding a VLAN to a vNIC. The Server Pools enforce the Service Profile on all blades in the pool, so we'd have to reboot all the blades if we want to add a VLAN to even one ESXi host.

How can we get our blades out of Server Pools while still keeping them configured with their current Service Profile? And afterwards be able to add VLANs to vNICS and only have to reboot the one blade getting the modification to its service profile...

Thanks!

Jeremy Waldrop · ‎01-10-2013

Server pools are used to group like servers together to facilitate faster, more automated service profile to server association. For example, you may have some servers meant for ESXi and some for Windows you could group them into their own respective pools based server qualification policies. ESXi host would probably have more RAM than the Windows host so you could create a qualification that is based on server RAM.

Service profile templates are then tied to server pools and when a service profile is deployed from the template it grabs an available server from the pool.

The reason you can't modify an individual service profile is because it was probably deployed from an updating service profile template. If you need to modify just 1 service profile and not the other you can unbind the service profile from the template so that you can modify it.

Mike Erter · ‎01-10-2013

I have been able to un-bind service profiles from service profile templates in other installations- BUT- it seems where I'm working now that the Service Profile Template also includes/enforces membership in the Server Pool.

It seems to somehow loop back on itself and not permit me to unbind.

The place in the Cisco UCS Manager GUI where you would click "Unbind from template" is greyed out and unavailable.