How to detach the Fibre in BladeCenter before proceeding the ESXi Installation on the particular blade host

[Kapil84]

Hello Every One,

I am trying to upgrade my Vmware ESX host enviroment from ESX 4.0 to ESXi 4.1

In my current enviroment I am using IBM blade Center H8852.  In which 6 blades are installed with ESX host and 4 blades are installed with ESXi  and all blaeds are attached to fibre SAN.

From the best practices guide and from some forum disuccsion I have figure out that  " If you are installing the ESXi on the local disk and if fibre attached SAN is connected to the ESX host, first you need to detached the Fibre before proceeding with the installation. If you do not disconnect the Fibre you may inadvertently choose an HBA adapter as a primary boot partition, which may result the loss of the data on the LUNs attached to the HBA adapter ".

So I want to detach my fibre cable from the the host that I want to upgrade to ESXi.

Because in my bladeCenter enviroment  all blades are connected to fibre and if I try to physically remove the fibre then it will affect the other blades in which all production servers are running.  So I dont want to do that.

I want to upgrade ESX host (Blades) to ESXi  one by one. I dont want to upgrade all blades to ESXi at a time.

So please let me know how  can I detach or disable the Fibre of perticular balde from BladeCenter.  So it will be easy for me to success fully upgrade ESXi host  on that perticular blade.

Best Regards.

[a_p_]

Personally I didn't do this since version 3.5 (no risk, no fun) Just be careful with selecting the installation disk.

The easiest way would be to just temporarily disable the FC switch ports for the host.

André

[RParker]

agree with a.p.  That "measure" was because 3.5 didn't identify which SAN you were connected, ESX 4.0 will identify the correct SAN drive, so it's easy to determine which is local and which is SAN, you should not need to disconnect the Fiber cable.

[Kapil84]

Thank you for the quick reply. Can you tell me how to disable the FC switch ports temporarily for that perticular host.

because I dont want to take a risk..

Regards,

Kapil

[a_p_]

I'm not familiar with IBM blade center you use. However, you either need access to the Web GUI or CLI for the FC switches, then you will need to find out which ports belong to the specific blade servers (e.g. check the manual or compare the WWNs on the ESX host and the ones displayed in the switch) and disable them.

André

[RParker]

Kapil84 wrote:

Thank you for the quick reply. Can you tell me how to disable the FC switch ports temporarily for that perticular host.

because I dont want to take a risk..

Just put the ESX 4.1 disk in the drive, boot it.  You will EASILY see which is your LOCAL disk and which are LUN (as identified by SAN ID), there is no "risk", those precautions are for an OLDER version of ESX, it's not necessary to disable fiber ports.

If you still insist you want to remove the fiber, just pull the fiber cables out from behind the server..... It's that simple.

[Kapil84]

Thank you for quick reply.

I will make sure that during installation of ESXi 4.1  i have choose the Local disk not SAN disk

Is there any other precaution do I need to take while installation of ESXi 4.1 on the Blade.

Thank you guys..

I appriciate you time and response.

Best Regards

Kapil

[a_p_]

Some thoughts about the update:

• Did you already upgrade vCenter Server to 4.1?
• VM based backup may need to be configured differently with ESXi than with ESX

André

[cjscol]

Which Fibre Channel Modules are you using in your BladeCenter, Cisco or Brocade?

[cjscol]

Which blades are you using?

HS22, HS22V and HX5 all allow you to install a USB Memory Key inside them and run ESXi frm there.

[Kapil84]

We are using HS 22 Blade & We are using Brocade fiber channel module.

[cjscol]

To disable the ports on the brocade switch modules in a BladeCenter:-

Telnet to each of the Brocade modules, you should have two of them in IO Bays 3 and 4

The blade in bay 1 is connected to port 1 on each brocade module

The blade in bay 2 is connected to port 2 on each brocade module

e.t.c

Run the following command on each broacde module (assuming you want to disable the port for the blade in bay 1, if the blade you want to disable is in another bay then change the 1 to the correct blade bay)

portdisable 1

To re-enable the port once you have done your upgrade issue the following command on each of the Brocade modules (again assuming the blade in bay 1)

portenable 1

If you wanted to double check that these are the correct ports issue the following command on the Brocade modules to see which WWN are connected to which port and compare to the WWN displayed on the Storage Adapters section of the Configuration tab for the host in the vSphere Client.

switchshow

If the Brocade modules you have are the 10port module, i.e. only blade bays 1-7 and 3 of the external ports are licenced then you could move the blade to be upgraded to one of the blade bays 8-14 as these do not have SAN connectivity.  However if you have the 20-port modules (or have upgraded the 10-port modules to 20-port modules) then you will have to use the portdisable / portenable commands to disable / enable the ports.

Assuming your have implemented single initiator zoning then you could remove the zones for the blade you are udgrading from the config / enable the config / perform the upgrade / add the zones back in to the config / enabe the config.

[Kapil84]

Hi A.p,

Thank you for time & help. I have upgraded successfully  one ESX 4.0  host to ESXi 4.1.

Now my my cluster has become a mixed esx cluster and i am trying to update rest of the also ESX 4.0 host to ESXi.4.1.

[Kapil84]

Hello Rparker,

Thank you for time & help. I have upgraded successfully  one ESX 4.0  host to ESXi 4.1.

Now my my cluster has become a mixed esx cluster and i am trying to update rest of the also ESX 4.0 host to ESXi.4.1.