[cisco-voip] going to 10.5.2 after upgrade and unaligned partitions

Thu Jan 8 12:10:22 EST 2015

Thanks Ryan.

There is certainly confusion surrounding this concept of partition
alignment for me.  Considering Erick's original statement of, "For those of
you sill out there doing upgrades from pre-9.x to 10.x and running nto the
unaligned partition issue...", I am trying to wrap my head around when I
might see this.

One Cisco employee says:
"For customers using jump upgrade (comming from 6.x, 7.x) a rebuild once
getting to CUCM 9.X is mandatory since the VM will miss-align during the
process."
Source:
https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/11903591/error-unsupported-partitions-unaligned-after-upgrade-ucm-912

But of course, the upgrade scenario Erick describes is not a Jump upgrade,
as he describes going from 8.6 to 10.5.  But, to continue on the Jump
upgrade process for just a moment longer...

Cisco Live Breakout BRKUCC-2011 on slide 28 shows that a DRS
export/Rebuild/Import is required for Jump upgrades to 9.1(2).
http://d2zmdbbm9feqrf.cloudfront.net/2014/usa/pdf/BRKUCC-2011.pdf

In the accompanying video for this Breakout, at the 8:04 mark, the
presenter starts to talk to this process, and describes disk alignment
pretty well.  Then, at 8:34 touches on how disks can become unaligned, but
I feel like he didn't articulate the point very well.  Would it have been
accurate to say that the install of 6x on VMWare, and the fact that there
is not a supported OVA for it, is what caused the disk alignment issue in
this process?

So now, it appears to me that this concept is only applicable to VMWare and
not MCS bare metal deployments.  Meaning, you could only possibly have
unaligned partitions if on VMWare.  Is that true?

If so, then it would also seem to me, there's only two possible ways to
have this issue of unaligned partitions:

1. If you are on VMWare now, with aligned partitions, and then you muck
with the VMWare settings for the guest, specifically the ones pertaining to
the disks. (do we know which settings?)
2. If you deploy new on VMWare without using an official OVA, but rather
you just manually build out the specs of the server, and miss the 64K
boundary for the disk alignment.

If we read Erick's other statement: "I used 10.5.2 upgrade media to upgrade
from 8.6, at that point you need to do the fresh install and DRS
restore routine to correct the unaligned partition issue.", then it would
seem as though his server was running with unaligned partitions on 8.6 to
begin with and this is not the rule, but rather the exception.

The assumption that he had unaligned partitions existing in 8.6, would then
further imply he was running 8.6 in VMWare and not bare metal.  He didn't
state that, but that's my guess.

However, since there are official OVAs for 8.6 and 10.5, I'm guessing the
only reason there was unaligned partitions in 8.6 is because one of two
possibilities:

1. The original 8.6 install on VMWare was done without the official OVA
2. The official OVA was used, but someone changed the disk settings some
time afterwards.

How'd I do Ryan?  I'm I getting it, or am I missing it?

Erick, do you have any further details to share with us since you just went
through this and most likely talked to TAC about it?

On Thu Jan 08 2015 at 10:20:08 AM Ryan Ratliff (rratliff) <
rratliff at cisco.com> wrote:

>  Nothing about an upgrade from 8.6 to 9.x or later guarantees unaligned
> partitions.  You will only get the error because your partitions were
> unaligned already.
>
> -Ryan
>
>  On Jan 7, 2015, at 11:19 PM, Erick Wellnitz <ewellnitzvoip at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>  I used 10.5.2 upgrade media to upgrade from 8.6, at that point you need
> to do the fresh install and DRS restore routine to correct the unaligned
> partition issue.
>
>  The issue occurs when you try to install a fresh subscriber after having
> done the DRS restore on the Publisher.
>
> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 8:06 PM, Anthony Holloway <
> avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't understand the scenario you are describing.  At first you talked
>> about upgrades from pre 9x to 10x.  Then you mentioned fresh installs of
>> 10.5(2).  Then you mentioned restoring publishers.  So, do we have:
>> upgrading, installing, and restoring all affected by this bug?
>>
>> On Wed Jan 07 2015 at 8:33:27 PM Erick Wellnitz <ewellnitzvoip at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>  For those of you sill out there doing upgrades from pre-9.x to 10.x
>>> and running nto the unaligned partition issue...
>>>
>>>  There is a bug that was opened on 12/30 regarding the fresh install
>>> with 110.5.2.10000-5
>>>  and installing the subscriber(s) ater the restore to the Publisher.
>>>
>>>  You get about 99% complete and run into a critical error.  The install
>>> log shows errors related to your web administrator account.
>>>
>>>  Fix requires root access.
>>>
>>>  Bug ID: CSCus35964
>>>
>>>  It wasn't available on bug search tool last I checked.
>>>
>>>
>>>  _______________________________________________
>>> cisco-voip mailing list
>>> cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
>>> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
>>>
>>
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