Add a second FlexFlash card to a provisioned blade without data loss

[Eric]

Is it possible to add a second FlexFlash SD card to an already provisioned B series blade running ESXi, changing the local boot config policy to mirror and then have the primary SD card sync to the secondary without having to scrub and wipe out everything currently running on the primary?

Thanks

[Wes Austin]

Hello,

Depending on which flexflash controller is in use, you can add a new card and the RAID should re-build, although can take some time depending on the size of the SD cards. 

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/whitepaper-c11-734876.html#_Toc459341667

If you encounter any metadata errors or degraded RAID, you are better off to just scrub and re-install the OS. 

If you are using an SD card that uses the more advanced FX3S controller (see Tables 1 and 2 earlier in this document), consider enabling Auto Sync as described in the section Using Out-of-Band Management later in this document.

If the SD cards are in a degraded RAID State, or if any metadata errors are reported by the controller (for example, RAID State: Enable Paired; Invalid Secondary), you need a FlexFlash scrub policy to pair the cards for mirroring or to resolve metadata errors while mirroring.

A degraded RAID state or metadata errors may occur if you:

●   Add a new SD card

●   Insert a SD card from a different server

HTH,

Wes