OA Stacking

[cindyparks]

Good morning! We are wanting to "stack" the OAs in 2 separate enclosures that are in a single VC domain. We're being told that this will allow us to do simple VC related tasks like move a server profile from one enclosure to the other if the enclosure containing the VC domain master becomes unavailable. 2 questions: 1) Besides the cabling and having all OAs, iLOs, and interconnect IP's on the same subnet, is there any additional configuration required within the OAs to make this work? 2) Can you confirm that stacking the OAs will indeed give us the ability to move server profiles from one enclosure to another if the master enclosure goes offline?

Thanks so much for your help.

Cindy

[The Brit]

Good Morning Cindy,
Stacking the OA's will allow you to log in to both enclosures simultaneously, and administer both enclosures in a single window - at the OA level.

You will have access to all the functionality available to a single enclosure, x2.

In otherwords, the Lefthand Navigation bar will have a full set of links for each enclosure, including "Virtual Connect Manager".

Since the VC modules in both enclosures are stacked into a single VC domain, then I would assume that clicking on either of the VCM links (on the left) can only take you to the same VC Domain.

I don't think it is necessary to have the OA's stacked to do that, it is just more convenient.

As for your final question. I am really not sure about this. I always assumed that if you stack two enclosures, the VC manager would run on Bay 1 on the Primary enclosure, with Bay 2 as the failover Manager. I dont know whether VMC can failover to Bay 1 on the secondary enclosure.

I shall watch this string with interest.

Dave.

[cjb_1]

Not sure what you mean by 'master enclosure goes offline'. To do a procedure like moving a profile vc needs to know the status of the currently assigned server. If it's up (or it thinks it's up for any reason) you won't be able to move profiles.

I did some testing a while back using VCEM to move profiles between enclosures and got into a mess when performing dr tests.

[Johan Guldmyr]

When I last looked into this there were some quite strict restrictions to how far apart the enclosures could be. Then (a year ago) they needed to be right next to each other.

[Bart_Heungens]

Don't mix up stacking OA modules among each other and VC modules.

By stacking OA modules (with a simpel ethernet cable with the up- and down-link connections at the back of the enclosure.
This is only for having a simplified managament of theenclosures. It is not important on which enclosure you log on, you will see in 1 console the 2 enclosures one below each other...

If you want to move VC server profiles from one enclosure to the other, you must stack the VC modules which is, depending of the modules you have, with CX4 or SFP cables.
This has nothing to do with the stacking of the OA modules...

Kr,
Bart