Modular Switch: swapping modules

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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 be B/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.