Difference between Decommissioning chassis and Removing?

[tmhudgins]

Hello,

I had a pair of 6120s managing a single UCS Chassis. I needed to switch to a different (set of 2) of chassis. I re-cabled the 6120s to the new chassis and UCSM now shows 3 chassis - Chassis 1 is the old one (and it has communication errors of course), and the 2 new ones.

I see that, for Chassis 1, I can either Decommission it or Remove it but I can find no documentation on what either does. Seems like I want to Remove it so that my new chassis are numbered from 1 to 2 but I don't know if I need to Decomm first or what.

Hope that all makes sense. Thanks for any insight,

Tom

[Shin Ito · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom,

When you'd like to remove a blade from a chassis, you generally have to "Decommision" the blade first. This will remove the blade information from the configuration database. So in your case, please select "Decommission" first before removing the corresponding blade to remove the blade from the DB, and then you can move the blade physically between the chassis's.

On the other hand, it's the case when you have to physically remove a blade from the chassis by any reason before decommissioning it, its information remains in the configuration database. Then please select "Remove" for the slot that the blade has ever been inserted to remove the blade information from the DB. You can't select "Remove" if the blade is physically inserted in the slot.

Please see also P.410 and 411 in "Cisco UCS Manager GUI Configuration Guide, Release 1.3(1)".

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/1.3.1/UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_1_3_1.pdf

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Decommissioning a Server

This procedure decommissions a server and deletes it from the Cisco UCS configuration. The server hardware
physically remains in the Cisco UCS instance. However, Cisco UCS Manager ignores it and does not list it
with the other servers in the chassis.

==========

==========

Removing a Non-Existent Server from the Configuration Database

Perform the following procedure if you physically removed a server from its slot in a chassis without first
decommissioning the server. You cannot perform this procedure if the server is physically present in the
chassis slot.

==========

Best regards,

Shin

[tmhudgins]

Thanks for the reply Shin. I was actually talking about the chassis as a whole, not a blade.

I ended up just removing the Chassis. Everything worked fine (after all the errors and warnings resolved themselves). The only remaining "issue" is that it didn't renumber the chassis so now I have Chassis 2 and 3 in my system - no chassis 1 - which looks kind of strange. Cisco Tac said that there is no way to renumber without destroying the whole config and rediscovering everything. I don't want to do that at this point.

Tom

[Shin Ito]

Hi Tom,

Sorry for the misreading..

As you mentioned, there is no way to renumber chassis without destroying the whole config and rediscovering everything. Sorry for your inconvenience.

Best regards,

Shin