Hi,
In order to shutdown and remove one blade server from a M1000e enclosure, do I need to shut down all the blades in the enclosure and switch off the enclosure? Is blade server hotswappable? what is the best practice here?
Thanks
Basheerpt,
You can remove the blades individually with the enclosure powered. The Blades are independent of each other and are hotswappable. So you can pull that blade with everything else running and it won't effect the other ones.
Dell | Social Outreach Services - Enterprise
Get Support on Twitter @DellCaresPro
Download the Dell Quick Resource Locator app today to access PowerEdge support content on your mobile device! (iOS, Android, Windows)
Thanks for that info. The blades are in a pool of virtualization (xen server). will it affect the pool configuraiton? I am not sure this additional question is relevant here.
Do you happen to have vMotion configured? It allows the VM's local to the specific blade to be transferred to another blade, in the event of a failure,. to eliminate downtime of the VM's.
Dell - Chris H Do you happen to have vMotion configured? It allows the VM's local to the specific blade to be transferred to another blade, in the event of a failure,. to eliminate downtime of the VM's.
vMotion is a VMware capability, but XenServer may have a similar capability (with a different name).
However, vMotion allows moving a virtual machine on the fly from one running physical server to another running physical server. This is handy for load balancing or pro-active maintenance (when you want to remove/replace one of the servers from the cluster).
If a physical server actually failed, vMotion is no longer relevant. At this point the VM will have died and (in VMware terminology) "HA" (high availability) comes into play; this feature will let the virtual machine be powered up again by one of the other hosts.
So, in the event of a failure (unless it's so minor that the host didn't fail/go down), vMotion is useless, but HA is the feature that re-assigns the VM to one of the remaining hosts and powers it up again.
Member since 2003
Thanks for the detailed information. As i understood (from experience) as long as i am not shutting down the pool master, and the VMs shut down safely in the affected host or move the VMs to other hosts manually through vmotion or migration (in xen they say Migration), i can shut down the host manually. It will not affect the pool configuration. If I want to shut down the host which hold the pool master, i guess we have to shut down all the hosts.
It may help someone..
Thanks for all the comments...
Each blade acts like an independent server within the blade chassis. Therefore, you don't have to power down the entire M1000e or ALL of the blades for that matter just to pull one blade server. However keep in mind that you need to perform an OS normal shutdown of the individual blade and power off that one blade before you remove it from the M1000e chassis. Blade servers are not really "hot swappable", as you need to power down the blade prior to removing it from the M1000e.