replacing blade switches

[gwelsh123]

have 2 x p class blade enclosures, with HP network switches, have purchased cisco gbe blade switches, and need to swop the HP switches out.
what steps need to be followed....

[HEM_2]

well it depends on the existing switch configurations and whether or not you need to maintain connectivity to the server blades during the swap out.....

When you say HP switches I assume you mean HP GBE or GBE2 switches and are replacing them with CGESM switches (Cisco Gigabit Ethernet Switch Modules).

From a hardware standpoint it is simple. If you are doing it in a maintenenace window where network service can be interrupted, simply pull out the GBE or GBE2 switches from the front and remove the quad modules from the back. Then you can insert the CGESMs.

All the other factors depend on the existing switch configurations and the desired configuration on the CGESMs

[gwelsh123]

yes, we are replacing HP GBE (2 network connections per enclosure swtich, 4 per enclosure) switches with the Cisco GESMs, each swith has 2 x rj45 SFPs (4 per enclosure), and i presume this will correspond to the existing 4 NICs that are present on each blade?

[gwelsh123]

how can this be done online then?

[aboerup]

The only way you could do this online without the servers in the enclosure losing network access temporarily (and this is an if) would be to get an additional NIC mezzanine and run all 4 switches at once, using HP NIC Teaming to team across the mezzanines and switches.
It seems like more trouble than its worth just pulling the gbe2s and putting the ciscos in