How to move a UCS Blade from one chassis to another

I’ve been in this situation a few times now, where I need to move a physical production UCS blade from one chassis to another.  It can make you nervous, worried that your server won’t come back up properly after the relocation.  What if the network configuration changes, what about storage, what about the OS?!  Rest assured, this is quite an easy procedure.  If you can bake a cake, you can relocate a UCS blade.

Whether you have local boot or SAN boot, this process will work as long as you’re moving the blade within the same UCS domain, under the same pair of Fabric Interconnects.  (You can actually achieve this across domains, but in most cases you wouldn’t do that, so I won’t be covering that here.)  Read carefully, and follow the steps during your maintenance window:

1. Shut down the OS running on the blade (Or if running a hypervisor – enter maintenance mode)
2. Shut down the server blade
   1. (Servers > Service Profile > General > Shutdown Server)
3. Make sure the Service Profile does not have a disk scrub policy associated!!
   1. (Servers > Service Profile > Policies > Scrub Policy)
4. Disassociate the Service Profile, wait for the disassociate to complete
   1. (Servers > Service Profile > General > Disassociate Service Profile)
   2. View status on the FSM tab of the blade
5. Decommission the blade from the UCSM
   1. (Equipment > Chassis > Server > General > Server Maintenance)
   2. View status on the FSM tab for the process
6. Remove the blade from the current slot
7. Move the blade to the new slot
8. Wait for the blade to fully discover again
   1. View status from the FSM tab of the blade
   2. You might be required to accept / acknowledge the slot to accept the blade and trigger the discovery.
9. Once discovered, associate the service profile
   1. (Equipment > Chassis > Server > General > Associate Service Profile)
10. Power on the blade
11. Boot the OS / or take server out of maintenance mode

You should now be back in business, all configuration status quo just like you moved a rack-mount server from one rack to another.  

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog and purely based on my experiences.  Please proceed with care and caution in your own environments.