UCS Blade NIC Speed 10000Mbps Instead of 20000Mbps

[Wilson Lee]

Hi,

We have installed 2X new B200 M5 Blades on an existing UCS-Mini chassis. The rest of the existing 6X blades are B200 M4 blades, running ESXi.

At a vCenter level all of the vNICs reported for the 6 X existing M4 blades are showing as 20000Mbps whilst all the 2X new M5 blades are only showing 10000Mbps 

We're not sure why the new blades are not reporting the full speed we're expecting

Appreciate the feedback and we're glad to provide additional information if needed

Thank you and cheers!

[flamegri11ed]

Our 3rd Chassis has 3 x B200 M5's in them showing 20GB and not 40GB as the other 2 Chassis with fully populated B200 M3's are.

Every Chassis's IOM has 4 cables plugged in per channel A+B (not 8 for 80GB)

What could be the reason for the 3rd chassis' reporting?

[Steven Tardy]

The "OS Speed" is determined by the VIC + Port expander (or not) + IO Module combination detailed in the blade spec sheet:

  https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b-series-blade-servers/b200m5-specsheet.pdf

Section:

  Table 15 Aggregate Bandwidth with Rear Mezzanine Cards Installed

Most often adding the (relatively inexpensive) port expander (PID: UCSB-MLOM-PT-01) is required.

The B200 M4 spec sheet has lots of good diagrams to visualize this connectivity:

  https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b-series-blade-servers/b200m4-specsheet.pdf

Section:

  Network Connectivity

[flamegri11ed]

Hi @Steven Tardy ,

Thank you for your response.

I did notice a difference in the number backplane ports between the fully populated B200 M3 chassis (x2) which have 4 ports per blade per channel compared to the 3rd chassis(M5)  with only 2 backplane ports per channel. I also noticed a number of random failure notification coming from M5 blades in this 3rd chassis.