It's been awhile

It's been awhile but I've been swamped in service tickets lately and by the time I get home I have little to no desire to do anything yet still end up learning AGK Basic programming.  I figured I would push blog post here so anyone that does view this blog on a semi-regular basis won't think I abandoned it due to lack of interest. 

I guess I could go back to the SD card thing first.  I ended up installing a new SD card on a UCS C200 last week since it didn't come with one when it should have.  Normally this isn't a huge task unless you have servers on top of servers with little to no room to work.  I ended up getting the SD card installed and verifying on the CIMC that everything was good to go.  Again, if you have never done this here are the steps:

1. Power down all VMs gracefully
2. Verify VMs are set to auto start in vSphere
3. Power down the ESXi OS via CIMC with "Shutdown Server" not "Power Off"
4. Unplug all cables in the way, to include the power cable
5. Pull the chassis cover off by unscrewing the back middle screw that holds the cover in place
6. Press the thumb inserts and press backwards
7. Use a flathead screwdriver very carefully if it is stubborn, don't break anything!
8. At the back of the server, near the RAM, there are two horizontal slots in the middle near the power supplies
9. Slide in the SD card into Slot 1 and the other SD card into slot 2 (if you have two SD cards...)
10. Put everything back together and power up
11. Verify the CIMC sees the SD card as a FlexFlash SD
12. Verify VMs are booted

Now normally, I wouldn't let the VMs auto start if I needed to make sure something was working on the chassis but since this is a straight forward install and nothing can really go wrong, I like to shave time off and just let the VMs auto boot once the ESXi host comes back up.

I know I've beaten this SD card topic to death by now and it isn't ending until next week.  I have to install two more cards and put them in RAID-1 and you better believe I'm posting results and the process for that as well.  I feel that even though this topic is rare and most won't mess with this issue, it is important for it to be well documented as Cisco is very quick and to the point without much help other than a .PDF doc.  Now that PDF is great, but coupled with an experience makes it even better so you can avoid any potential issues down the road.