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

Thu Jan 8 12:33:47 EST 2015

Inline, lots of good stuff below.

-Ryan

On Jan 8, 2015, at 12:10 PM, Anthony Holloway <avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com<mailto:avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com>> wrote:

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

RR> This is correct, any Jump upgrade will result in unaligned partitions.

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...

RR> Also correct, 8.6 to 10 isn't a Jump and there is no reason a virtualized 8.6 will be unaligned.

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?

RR> The installation process for 6.x and 7.x will create unaligned partitions regardless of what OVA is used.  There was a defect IIRC in early 8.0 and in some Unity Connection installs that would also create unaligned partitions, but outside of defects 8.x and later installs won't break partition alignment whereas earlier versions definitely will.

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?

RR> Absolutely true.  The concept of alignment is specific to virtualized filesystems.

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?)

RR> re-creating or reformatting an existing disk is the easiest way to do it.

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.

RR> Correct. Our OVA includes partitioned vDisks that are aligned.

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.

I agree wholeheartedly.

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.

RR> A safe assumption, or the P2V process he used went through a Jump along the way.

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.

RR> Right on, see my previous comments on ways partitions get unaligned.

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

RR> Definitely getting 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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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.

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