This weekend I'm planning to (at long last) take a bunch of a equipment off of a hand-made (2x4s and plywood) bench and mount it all in a proper rack. One of the items to move is an HP 5406zl modular switch with two modules, shown below:
It's currently sitting in a two-poster rack, and the edge of the bench I'm "retiring" is seen to the left. It's moving because it's too heavy for the two-post rack, which is not correctly secured to the floor and will also be "retired".
The arrangement of the new rack is such that it will be very advantageous to swap the two modules in the switch. The bright orange fiber cables should move to the left, the blue and gray cat5e cables should go to the right.
My current plan is to take a config backup on Thursday, and edit the file to swap all references to modules A and B on Friday, in order to be ready for the changes over the weekend.
My question here is a basic sanity check. Will this work? Is it even necessary (ie: would the switch detect that what is plugged into module B is the same module that used be in A, and just move it's configuration accordingly? What should I watch out for?
I am a HP switches guy, and I can confirm that you can swap the two blades easily enough, but you will need to re-configure the ports - the physical media change you're making doesn't automatically map to a logical configuration so you will need to (re)define this explicitly.
As you suggest, taking a backup and then grabbing the port configs with
show running-config
editing the port config then playing them back will work just fine.I'm not an HP Switches guy, but a quick scan of the 5400zl series documentation doesn't seem to indicate that there would be any problem swapping these modules from a hardware/architecture standpoint.
You may need to reconfigure the switch (because you're changing the type of modules in each slot, and depending on how HP numbers the interfaces what used to be
A/GbE1
might now beB/GbE1
or similar, so stuff like vLAN rules may be affected -- if you're prepared for that and have an adequate outage window it shouldn't be a major issue, and the work involved would certainly be worth it for neater cabling, at least in my view.