Virtual Connect Flex10 - changing Vlan mode from mapped vlan to tunneled vlan in production setup

[chuckk281]

Ramu had some Virtual Connect questions:

*************************

Hi Champs

One of the customer has gone live and using the setup for about 8 months with Virtual Connect Flex-10 configured with Mapped Vlan mode. Now the setup requires more than 100 Vlans to be implemented and hence we need to change the VC Flex-10 setting to Tunnel Vlan mode.

There are 11 numbers of BL460G6 servers with 375+ virtual desktops configured in this setup (VMware View based). We are about to convey to the customer that we might need 4 to 8 hours of downtime for the entire setup to complete this configuration change (we need to split few uplink ports to complete this configuration).

Is there any guide available to perform this configuration change? Or anyone already done similar to this change anywhere?.

Please help to forward any document if available.

********************************

Steve had some advice:

*****************************

Take a look at the VC Ethernet Cookbook, Scenario 2:4 addresses this configuration.  I would not expect such a lengthy outage.  Might be safe to plan a bit longer, however, could be done somewhat quickly.  Understand, you DO NOT need to delete or recreate the Domain. 

Simple steps, make sure none of the servers are configured for "Multiple Networks", once this has been done, you can reconfigure the Domain to accept the Tunnel Mode setting.  Then remap the NICs that were set to Multiple to this new vNet, which would be configured for VLAN TUNNELING and would be presented the same VLANs as before, possibly more.

I would propose the order and steps as follows (assuming you have a full outage and access);

1.       Ensure no servers are configured for Multiple networks

2.       Set the domain to tunnel mode

3.       Drop uplinks from the existing SUS (you mentioned moving cables….)

4.       Create new vNet with the correctly configured (VLAN tagged) uplink, ensure Tunnel in tunnel mode

5.       Connect the NICs that were connect to Multiple Networks to the net Tunneled vNet

6.       Test server connectivity

Assuming you are not adding or removing NICs and the server driver, FW and VC are up to date, you could do this without even power the servers off.

This could ALL be scripted and the script would not take more than a few minutes to execute.  (testing will take a bit longer).

*********************

Other suggestions? Comments?