VCEM failover manually possible with assigned VC profile?

[chuckk281]

Philipp had a Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager question:

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 I’m asking if it’s possible to do VCEM failover from prod. to failover site when failover site has other profiles assigned, and I unassign them and make the check for spare profile designation before initiating the VCEM failover manually?  So spare Blade on failover site could be used differently (until disaster) and is not idle/off/unused all the time?

Anyone has a proof of this, documentation even better?

Referencing to

460924-003, February 2012

HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager Profile Failover and Profile Moves

Technical white paper

Configuring and managing spare bays and servers 
Designating spare bays and populating them with servers is the final step before user-initiated failover is ready to use. Profile Failover always selects a qualified spare from the source server’s VC Domain Group. A qualified spare is a bay designated as a spare that: 

• Has no assigned profile. 
• Has a server blade that is physically present and powered off. 
• Is the same model as the source server. If failover finds no “qualified spare” then the failover operation fails.

            Note: Removing the check from the Spare check box removes the bay’s designation as a spare. Assigning or moving a server profile to a bay will also remove its spare designation 

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Reply from Fred:

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Yes, what you describe is possible. Here’s a snippet from the VCEM UG describing the manual steps and how Profile Failover automates them:

The manual movement of a VC server profile requires the following steps to complete the operation, but VC Server Profile Failover combines these separate steps into one seamless task:

1. Power down the original or source server.

2. Select a new target server from the VC Domain Group spare pool.

3. Move the VC server profile to the target server.

4. Power up the new server.

VC Server Profile Failover operations require the source and target servers to be configured to boot-from-SAN, and can be initiated from the VCEM graphical user interface (GUI) as a one-button operation or from a command line interface (CLI). When used with the automatic event handling functionality in Systems Insight Manager, VC Server Profile Failover operations can be automatically triggered based user-defined events. When selecting a target server from a pool of defined spare systems, VC Server Profile Failover automatically chooses the same server model as the source server.

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