Oh man….WordPress has a new editor it’s wanting me to use and I’ll try it out, though it’s likely I’ll be highly aggravated by the time I’m done with this. New editors notwithstanding, I’m pressing on.
In working a TAC case for a malfunctioning RAM in a B200 UCS blade, Cisco determined the systemboard of this system needed to be replaced. And since I’m a couple hundred miles away from this blade, a Cisco Field Engineer was sent to perform the actual swap. After the FE left, I connected to UCS Manager to see the server sitting at “Unable to match boot policy to currently available devices”
Cisco UCS – Unable to match boot policy
Initially, I believed I was receiving this error because the FE forgot to transfer the SD cards from the old to the new system but upon further investigation, I found that wasn’t the case. Looking at the storage inventory, I saw that though the SD cards were present, the State of the FlexFlash Controller read Disconnected Partition From Host as shown below:
FlexFlash Controller – Disconnected Partition From Host
A quick search led to the Cisco Bug Search page CSCvb94472 and this workaround:
Create a new local disk policy and ensure that FlexFlash is disabled
Associate the new policy to the service profile
Change the local disk policy back to the original policy that has FlexFlash enabled
I’m pleased to report that completing these steps did resolve the issue. However, left out of the workaround steps is the fact that if your service profile assigned to the blade in question is bound to a service profile template (SPT), you’ll need to unbind the service profile from the SPT to edit the local disk configuration policy of a specific blade, otherwise the option to do so is grayed out as shown below:
The option to change the local disk configuration policy is grayed out when a service profile is bound to a SPT
To expand upon the workaround steps, I performed the following:
Unbind the service profile assigned to the blade from its SPT
Change the local disk configuration policy to one that has FlexFlash disabled
Change the local disk policy to one that has FlexFlash enabled
At this point, the State of the FlexFlash controller should read Connected Partition Over USB to Host
Boot the server to verify vSphere loads
Rebind the service profile assigned to the blade back to the SPT
FlexFlash Controller reads Connected Partition Over USB To Host – you should be able to boot off your SD cards once again!Conclusion
Yes, the new WordPress editor has left me somewhat aggravated….
Thank you. This fixed a no-boot issue that I’ve been working on with TAC for 2 days. TAC was convinced the SD card was faulty.