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UCS - Persist WWNN & WWPN With New Service Profile From Template

Bill Gurling

• 1 min read

I have been looking for an excuse to blog about something other than CloudGateway and thankfully, I finally found it today (aww c'mon Citrix, you know I love you baby). I had someone ask me how they could create a new Service Profile from a Service Profile template while retaining the WWNN and WWPNs from their existing profile. The reason behind this was that the old profile was no longer going to be used, but it was already zoned into the SAN. So if we could duplicate the WWNN and WWPNs we wouldn't have to zone the new profile into the SAN. So without further adieu:

  1. Create the new service profile from your template.
  2. Record the WWNN/WWPN addresses from your current profiles HBAs (be sure you know which address goes on which fabric).
  3. Disassociate the current profile from the server.
  4. Delete the current profile.
  • You could also unbind it from the template and change the WWPN/WWNN addresses.
  • UCSM will not let you have duplicate addresses even if one of the profiles is not associated.
  • Before we can move the addresses we need to make them available again that is the goal here.
  1. Unbind your new service profile from it's template.
  2. Unbind your vHBAs in the new service profile from their templates.
  3. Manually modify the WWPNs for all vHBAs, set them to match the addresses you recorded earlier (be sure to put the proper address on the proper fabric) this can be done via the vHBAs object in the Servers tree view, just drill down into your new Service Profile.
  4. Use the Change World Wide Node Name action, select manual using OUI, paste in the WWNN that you recorded earlier.
  5. Save the changes you made.
  6. Bind the vHBA's back to their original vHBA template.
  7. Bind the Service Profile back to its original template.
  8. Associate the service profile with the server.

It looks like a lot of steps but the whole thing takes maybe 5 minutes. There may be an easier way to do this - I've heard simply binding the existing profile to the ESXi template would keep the WWNN and WWPNs the same while adding the other necessary components and configurations to the profile. That being said, this is what we did, and it worked. Please let me know if you've tried something easier and had success. I in no way claim to be the absolute authority on UCS.

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