I am upgrading from ESXi 5 to 5.1 and it looks like VUM should do the trick. In the past I have rebuilt ESXi hosts during the upgrade, so I have not had to worry about disconnecting FC cables from the hosts. Since I won't be interactively performing the upgrade and it is VMware's best practice to disconnect FC cables, what should I do with c7000 based blades running on SD cards? Should I worry about disconnecting FC from these blades? If so, what is the recommended method of doing this in a c7000 blade chasis?
Thanks,
-Matt
I have successfully done VUM upgrades from 4x-5 and from 5.0 - 5.1 and in these cases I have not disconnected storage - just maint mode, remediate and off to the races.
I think the admonition to disconnect fc is simply to protect agains dumb human fat-fingers (or fat-headed choices) that could munge up a datastore. An automated update does not make any new storage choices - it simply upgrades code in place.
My 0.02
I understand the concern with the LUN being visible during the upgrade. I want to understand if there are specific instances that using VUM to apply the upgrade could somehow delete VMFS volumes during the upgrade of a blade running 5.0 on an SD card.
-MattG
IIRC the lat time I disconnected FC ports from a host in order to upgrade it was with ESX 3.0. With newer versions I didn't see any issues so far. If you want to disconnect the blades from the storage anyway, you may just temporarily disable the FC ports on the FC switch.
André
Well Matt I believe I answered the question you actually asked:
"Should I worry about disconnecting FC from these blades?"
My answer: no
I've done a version of this same upgrade possibly 15 times and have never disconnected FC. Obviously this does not gaurantee you won't have an issue, but logically the automated upgrade process will not ever make new storage choices, so it will not ever munge or over-write a connected datastore.
Agreed Andre - no need.
But taking the scenario a little further - if one WERE to disable the ports on the FC switch, you would want to first put the host in maint mode, then disable the ports, then start the remediation process. But - after disabling the ports, the host would potentially go into an APD situation - as it would no longer see it's storage.
Perhaps that would not matter, as long as the host is in maint mode?
It just seems like unnecessary complication and risk, frankly
Unfortunately, it is fairly risky with blades as the FC cables are shared. I would need to change the zoning on to the host and then add it back.
-MattG
Unfortunately, it is fairly risky with blades as the FC cables are shared.
I'm talking about disabling the downlinks on the FC switches in the interconnect bays, not removing any cables on the back of the switches.
André
If you were super paranoid, as an alternative to disconnecting FC physically, you could create an install image that has the HBA driver removed (using Image Builder PowerCLI). Upload that to Update Manager or create a bootable ISO. Once the image is deployed onto your host, install the HBA driver.