After performing a successful clone using Clonezilla of my physical BL460 Gen7 blade that was my W2019 Data Center server with Sam Broadcaster that served as my music server, it was time to move my C7000 blade chassis out of my rack and power it down. I’ll have more on my P2V clone to XCP-ng as a VM in another post I already have drafted.
I am already up on my new XCP-ng virtualization servers and have been on it for a while now. They are hanging out in my hallway and need to come into the rack. There was no space for the new servers in the rack with the C7000 chassis and my UPS equipment.
The UPS equipment was sitting right on top of my C7000 chassis as its sole support. The UPS are also plugged into my 2 NAS (TrueNAS custom) systems, plus I wanted to make sure that I had my cabling connected properly if I needed to power my C7000 blade server for anything again after moving out of the rack.
With the C700 powered down, I started with my top UPS cluster and moved the connections to the other UPS clusters. Then moved the UPS to a furniture dolly to the side of the rack, moved the power connections back to the UPS cluster on the furniture dolly. I repeated this with my next two UPS clusters, stacking them on top of each other. Since my NAS systems are dual homed with power, they had no issues along with my switches. My consumer level routers did end up going down however (I plan on replacing the consumer routers with OpenSense custom build soon). I had to reboot my router on my main domain but besides that everything was smooth.
Next, how to move the C7000 out of the rack and be able to properly connect it back. As you can see, my wire management is not good. What I decided to do was not disconnect the networking cables from the C7000. I traced the networking cables back to their respective switches, disconnected them at the switches, ran them through the back of the rack on top of the C7000 chassis, back to the switches via the front of the rack so that when I pull the chassis out the cables are coming through the rack front with the chassis connected to the switches which are in front of the rack. This way I was able to keep the cables connected where they were in the chassis back to the proper switch. It was easier to determine which switch the cable went to than which module\port in the back of the chassis.
Then as you can see below, I pulled the C7000 chassis out after disconnecting the power on to another furniture dolly I had and placed it on the other side of the rack. I can now power the C7000 chassis and blades up if I need to for any reason with the proper networking. The power consumption and heat even with the C7000 blade system just idling while plugged in and all the blades down is a bit of a load. My UPS equipment is barely registering anything with the C7000 chassis not plugged into power!
Next steps will be placing my UPS equipment at the bottom of the rack and then placing my newly built XCP-ng hypervisor servers into the racks, then properly attach all my networking equipment within the rack. I will do better with cable management as well.
I have to say the physical part of vacating the C7000 went smoother than I thought it would with my plan to systematically move the UPS clusters one at a time. Routing the networking cables through the back of the rack keeping them plugged into the chassis was the big key.
