I would like to ask for some help/advice about getting CMC redundancy in a VRTX system. We have a VRTX chassis with one CMC card. The VRTX has 4 blades. Currently everything is up and runnning.
We have just bought a new CMC card and its own SD Card. I am trying to find information about it, but there is no much. My questions are:
- Can we insert the new CMC card into the VRTX chassis with the blades and the chassis powered up? (hot plug)
- Will both CMC cards synchronise automatically or is there anything we need to do?
- If the active and standby CMC cards have different firmware versions, do we need to power down all the blades/hosts to upgrade the firmware in the CMC?
CMC Module is hot pluggable. All setting and configuration on active CMC will be synchronized to standby CMC. You need to maintain same firmware version on both CMC. Do you know the firmware version on CMC installed on the chassis and one you have. If CMC firmware differ then CMC will be shown as redundant degraded and we need to update CMC FW to ensure both are on same version.
Thanks for your answer. Do you know if we need to power down all the blades/hosts to upgrade the CMC firmware? I have read 2 different Dell documents, in one of them says "if the blades are powered on, it is not necessary to power off", but in a second one says "before updating any chassis components, all server nodes must be powered down"
DELL-Shine K
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Posted September 30th, 2020 21:00
CMC Module is hot pluggable. All setting and configuration on active CMC will be synchronized to standby CMC. You need to maintain same firmware version on both CMC. Do you know the firmware version on CMC installed on the chassis and one you have. If CMC firmware differ then CMC will be shown as redundant degraded and we need to update CMC FW to ensure both are on same version.
Refer below link for more details
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/us/en/19/poweredge-vrtx/cmcvrtx33ug/understanding-redundant-cmc-environment?guid=guid-ae8daa15-8c5b-49ea-bdf9-148c6e6a89f1&lang=en-us