Upgrade interconnect switches

[TobiasW]

Hello

We have a couple of c7000 enclosures in production today and we are using HP GBE2c switches in interconnectbay 1 and 2.

We would like to upgrade/replace these switches with new Flexfabric switches.

No problem with that! The tricky part comes here, we would like to do the switchover live, during production. The process is described as first replacing the secondary switch and after that the primary. This is far from optimal and i would like an second opinion if this is even possible before we even start to think further.

In other setups i have been involved/handling with we have done these type of changes during a window where all servers are shutdown and the backend is rebuilt and then restarted/tested as the profiles often needs to be redone.

I have a feeling that it will not be possible to do this the way described as the technology is a bit different and i guess the profiles/settings towards the blades can be problematic when the technology is different and when the switches arent aware of eachother as they are not part of the same domain?

I also have some memory of reading/seeing that blades need to be shutdown/restarted to get the correct LOM settings/profile.

What are your take on this?

Replacing a flexfabric switch to another of the same sort is not a problem but how is it when switching to another model/type of switch?

[LouisH]

As far as I know, you cannot do this "live". Once you insert and configure VC, all network connections out of the enclosure are handled by VCM. Each server will need to have a profile configured and applied. To apply a profile the server must reboot at least two times, initially. VCModules are configured as a pair, so a rolling upgrade is not possible. sorry.

Regards,

Louis

[TobiasW]

Great. As i thought then! Thank you