Fabric Interconnect elections are infrequent and may only occur under an equipment failure or user-forced conditions. A user-forced condition may occur during the firmware upgrade of the Fabric Interconnects. Firmware is upgraded on the subordinate Fabric Interconnect first and after the reboot of the FI, it is converted to primary and then the firmware of the current primary is upgraded. In order to force an election, connection to the local-management interface using CLI is required:

1. UCS-A #connect local-mgmt: This connects to the local management interface of the cluster.
2. UCS-A (local-mgmt) #cluster{force primary|lead{a|b}}: The cluster lead command and cluster force primary command are two separate commands that can be used to start an election. The cluster force primary command can be used on the secondary Fabric Interconnect to make it primary. It can be used in critical situations where the primary Fabric Interconnect has failed. The cluster lead a|b command can be used on Fabric Interconnects to change the current cluster lead to peer A or peer B.