Replace an enclosure in an existing VC multi-enclosure stack?

[chuckk281]

Glyn was working with a customer and ended up having to replace a c7000 enclosure. Now he needs to get everything back to normal:

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Hi experts.

One of my customers as the result of an escalated call has been provided with a replacement enclosure for one of the C7000 in their installation of 4 enclosures in a VC stack.  At previous times all the vc modules etc have been replaced, this is a confidence building exercise as I understand.  They will be putting all the current OA’s and VC modules into the new enclosure.

I have a couple of questions about achieving this in the best way:

My initial thought would be to un-assign all profiles on the affected enclosure (they have about 60 servers in the stack so each enclosure is fairly full), remove the enclosure from the stack, replace with the new one, re-import it, then re-apply the profiles.  The only issue I can see with this is that it is enc2 that is being swapped so they will end up with what was enc3 & enc4 becoming enc2 & enc3 with the ‘old’ enc2 becoming enc4.  I’m not sure if this will be a problem for them.

The other option is to do a full VC domain backup (well we would do that anyway) and just restore it after the hardware swap – this would not cause the enc no’s to change but probably represents a bigger risk?

Finally, just out of interest, will the OA’s retain their settings if moved into a new enclosure?  I would take a config script from the gui, edit it for user names etc, then deploy it from telnet if I need to reconfigure the OA.

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Monty provided guidance:

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You need to be aware of the Customer Advisory on replacing the midplane with Virtual Connect c01297654

http://h41302.www4.hp.com/km/saw/view.do?docId=emr_na-c01297654-11&hsid=26854981

Virtual Connect uses the enclosure serial number to key the domain. 

Changing ANY midplane in a multi-enclosure VC domain results in loss of the enclosure serial number – and will result in those servers losing their profiles and connectivity if the CA instructions above are not followed.

Following these instructions will result in the enclosure serial number being updated to match the original enclosure serial number.  Then when all the interconnects and blades are plugged back into the enclosure, Virtual Connect will identify that all enclosures match the stored serial numbers and there should be no problems with the servers or VC domain.

Yes – each OA module saves the settings on the module.  Replace both OA modules removed from the old enclosure or midplane, update the enclosure serial number and other two items in the CA above and all other OA settings including user accounts will be restored automatically.

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Big job. Needs careful orchestration to get it done right. Have you done this? Let us know your experiences.