Upgrade Virtual Connect Flex-10 uplink tranceivers to 10GbE

[chuckk281]

Adam was looking to upgrade a customers uplinks to 10GbE from 1GbE:

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Customer of mine is planning to move from 1Gbe SFP to 10GbE SFP+ and I’m not sure we could do it online.

Underlying Servers are using Linux Bonding in Mode1 FT (active-backup) so we could upgrade first uplink on Module1 and then Module2 and underlying OS should only see link degradation. We will not touch VC Network config. and Server profiles. Is this doable upgrade path?

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Help has arrived:

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From Erno:

Don’t expect the fail over to happen without interruptions. It will take a while (timeout) to first realize that we have link down before Linux starts the fail over. After that, registering the IP address through the second module is not lightning fast either. We are not speaking minutes, but if someone is transferring data they will notice it and it might even timeout the connection. If you have possibility to arrange outage for this, do it. At least you save yourself from surprises.

Input from Chris:

Well, if the configuration is a single vNet with all uplinks assigned (Active/Standby), the likelihood of an outage is quite minimal if not completely unnoticeable.  If the configuration is Active/Active, I would disable one of the vNets, swap out the transceivers, enable it, disable the remaining vNet, replace the transceivers then enable it.

I would certainly plan for a few minutes of downtime.  I would check the bond config, and even test failover if you have not done so, prior to performing the upgrade of the transceivers.

From Dave:

 Are the 1Gbe a single uplink or multiple per bay?

I had one site we upgraded from 3 x 1GbE to 10GbE. They had 3 x 1Gbe uplinks per bay(module) and were running A/A.

I pulled out one cable/RJ45 SFP in bay 1, replaced it with a 10G DAC and it became the active uplink within seconds. The other 2 - 1Gbe links went to standby.

We then were able to modify the bay2 with 10GbE. After all had settled we removed the other 1GbE cables and SFPs.

Site users did not know we upgraded.

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Have you done this? How did it go?