This one is for my fellow Cisco UCS adopters.
For those who are unaware, the Cisco UCS is new unified compute platform consisting of server blades, chassis, and a pair of special top of rack switches called fabric interconnects (think Nexus 5000 on steroids). The system is managed from the UCS Manager which runs on those top of rack switches. Click here to read more on the UCS.
I recently needed to swap out a blade in a UCS chassis. I installed the new processors, memory, and CNA in the new blade (really nice, clean design BTW). Then I took the two local drives from the old blade and installed them in order in the new blade. I slapped the server back into the chassis, logged into the UCS Manager and then re-acknowledged the server. I then booted the server expecting it to just boot VMware ESX since nothing has really changed. The server was associated with the proper service profile, all of the policies associated with that profile were still valid, and nothing has changed with the boot policy or boot order…so one would think it would just work, right?
Murphy says: “no thank you.”
The server kept trying to PXE boot, which is the last option in the boot order. I double-checked the boot order and RAID configuration policy in UCS Manager but nothing has changed. So why is it not booting from the local disk?
As it turns out, the local drives that were once in the old blade had an array configuration which needed to be activated on the new blade. Here’s the how-to:
- Boot the server and when prompted, press CTRL+C to invoke the LSI configuration utility.
- Select the adapter and press enter.
- Select RAID Properties and press enter.
- Select Manage Array and press enter.
- Select Activate Array and press enter. Wait for the status to be Optimal.
- After the array is Activated, select Synchronize. This step may take several minutes. (It took about 10 minutes for me.)
- After the synchronization is complete, exit the LSI utility and reboot.
That was easy.
After the array set is activated and synchronized, the server should boot from the OS which was initially installed. Problem solved…booting ESX…cool.
A special thanks goes out to Adam for his brilliance with the “Hey…maybe it’s this…” suggestion. It saved a call to support.
