"We anticipate the upgrade to take one day and will require a freelancer who will be available fully to perform pre-installation checks and updates to firmware/software as well as end to end checks and any communication with Cisco TAC during this project"
Communications with Cisco TAC can take from one day to a week.
"VMWare is currently running on the existing blades and the new blades/capacity must be made available for the VMWare layer."
So project goal is:
1) configuring new 5108 chassis with two blades;
2) configuring SAN zoning;
3) setup/configuring VMware ESXi on blades.
Am I right?
First part is just creating service profiles for new blades and associating them with blades.
Second part can be tricky but well documented (Flexpod design guide).
Third part can take the most of time.
About me:
Data Center engineer with 8+ years experience with enterprise hardware (HP/Dell/IBM/Cisco blades and servers, IBM mainframes, EMC/HDS/IBM/NetApp SAN/NAS) and vendor certifications (RedHat RHCE, Cisco CCNA DC in progress and many others Data Center focused trainings)
Occupied from 09:00 to 19:00 GMT+5 on my primary job (available for urgent cases by SMS).