Migrating From a UCS FI6248 to Mini 6324

I have the luxury of working for the most awesomest storage and Cisco VAR in the world, as their Principal Technologist.  We have a few different groups of engineers.  Our networking team staked claim on the existing UCS and Fabric Interconnects 6248’s that we have in our lab for break/fix testing.

Before and After view of my migration from FI6248 to FI6324

This meant that our demo and test VMware environment needed a new home.  We really didn’t NEED another full set of big daddy FI’s in the lab, and the big boss didn’t want to buy another full set of FI6248s.  We need a test environment for me to give classes with, that’ll support up to 600 VMs.   A UCS Mini 6324 fits the bill!

The FI6324 Fabric Interconnect

Networking on FI6324

Now, UCS Mini’s can’t connect to FC Switches without being on 3.0(2), which just came out.  The MOMENT you get your mini, upgrade!  Do not pass go, UPGRADE!  This patch added NPV AND an HTML5 UCSM GUI!!!! Woot!

Being that my existing UCS environment was absolute perfection against all my storage, booting from san, I really didn’t want to recreate all my service profile templates from scratch.  I decided to take this an an opportunity to play and learn some “What If?” scenarios.

I can absolutely see some of my customers taking configurations from HQ, and needing to apply them in DR or remote sites.  A certain application’s DR may be a smaller subset of the whole, needing just a Mini.

I went through the typical export of the “Logical Configuration” from the original FI’s, and I wanted to import them into the UCS Mini.  But wait… not so fast.  The FI Mini’s don’t have the same fibrechannel naming or physical objects.

Going through the configuration restore (you can find more information here), my XML kept getting rejected.

What could be wrong?  I must have tried 20 different options.  Then it hit me.  FCP and the San Cloud.  In the 3.0(1) release, external FC Switching wasn’t supported.  In 3.0(2) NPV was supported, but this is different than in the FI6248.

If I wanted this to work, I had to remove the FC parts of my backup XML.   I started searching for all XML entities with FC, FCoE, and my VSAN/VLAN IDs for these objects.

I narrowed down the issue to <fabricFcEstcCloud> and <fabricSanCloud>. These had entities in them such as <fabricVsan>.

You can quickly see what you need to remove in an XML Authoring application like oXygen.

FC related section of the XML Logical Configuration

One of the FC XML Sections in oXygen

 Once I removed these entities completely, I was able to import into my FI648 backup configuration into my FI6324! From there, I switched my FI ports to NPV/FC ports, and associated them to the proper FC Trunk and VSAN.

 
Here are the 2 blocks of XML I removed to import my LOGICAL CONFIGURATION. Click the wordwrap button to see it better.
 

6324 DataSheet

UCS Manager 3.0(1) Notes

What’s the UCS Mini downside?  You need to license the 40gb (4x10gb) scalability port on the FI 6324s.  This wasn’t made readily aware to me when procuring one for our lab. Well worth it for the small cost it may add.

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