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Question: Can I avoid downtime when removing enclosures from Virtual Connect Stacking?

 
KailahG
HPE Pro

Question: Can I avoid downtime when removing enclosures from Virtual Connect Stacking?

Stefan had a question about an issue he encountered while attempting to remove enclosures from Virtual Connect stacking:

 

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Hi all

 

I am helping a customer migrating away from using VC Stacking.

The plan is remove one enclosure at the time, until only the base enclosure is left.

 

According to the Multi-Enclosure Stacking Reference Guide the way is:

You must first unassign or move all the server profiles that were assigned to server bays in the enclosure you want to remove.

You must also make sure that no network, shared uplink set or port monitor use any uplink port on the VC modules in that enclosure.

 

I have done the above, and is still not able to delete the enclosure from the group. Then I remembered the SAN Fabric. Could this be the show stopper?

The customer is using VC-FC modules, and the Fabric include ports on all 4 enclosures. I wanted to remove just a single port from the Fabric but it turns out, that it is not possible.

I can only remove the entire Fabric, and the plan was to do this without downtime for the remaining enclosures.

 

I have remove the ports from the Trunking, that was standby on the enclosure that I wish to remove. Unassigned/delete server profiles.

I cannot find anything left but the SAN Fabric that refers to the enclosure to delete.

 

Ideas are welcome

 

Thanks in advance,

Stefan

 

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There were a couple of responses, and one specifically letting Stefan know that unfortunately, the task would not be possible without downtime, and why:

 

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Hi Stefan,

 

I usually approach this by recommending to expand the enclosure needing to be removed, below the hardware overview.  Then select each interconnect module, one at a time and inspect the uplinks and downlinks to confirm there are no remaining profile or network dependencies. 

 

Robert

 

 

 

The main problem I see is that when VC-FC modules are in the same bay group of a multiple Enclosure group, they are all automatically in use so the without downtime approach is not possible. So you are required to delete the FC SAN Fabrics because when they were created, VC automatically selected the same uplink ports from all VC-FC modules that were part of the Multiple Enclosure Stacking Domain. And in order to delete the SAN Fabrics, you must first unassign the SAN connection from all profiles, including the ones in your primary enclosure and this unfortunately means downtime.  - Lionel

 

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Hopefully this was a useful topic for some of you. Please leave comments or thoughts!