Hi All,
I want to ask several hardware related questions:
1. Can the points in the red box below be further expanded to include the Intelligent Fabric Module, just like the two above slice
2. May I ask if the port on the Intelligent Fabric Module is the all port channels, and how are the available ports allocated to blade server?
3. How is the bandwidth allocation between LAN(eth) and SAN (vhba)on the VIC card?
1. Can the points in the red box below be further expanded to include the Intelligent Fabric Module, just like the two above slice
No, those slots are reserved for (optional) X-Fabric Modules
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-x-series-modular-system/datasheet-c78-2472574.html#Featuresandbenefits
"At the bottom are slots ready to house future I/O modules that can flexibly connect the compute modules with I/O devices. We call this connectivity Cisco UCS X-Fabric technology because “X” is a variable that can evolve with new technology developments."
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-x-series-modular-system/x9508-specsheet.pdf#page23
"Each X-Fabric module provides native PCIe Gen4 x16 connectivity to the X210c or X410c Compute node and the Cisco UCS X440p PCIe Node."
My assumption is that the X-Fabric module is a prerequisite for the PCI node / riser card / GPU options lower down.
2. May I ask if the port on the Intelligent Fabric Module is the all port channels
All connectivity between the IFM and FI server port is automatically configured in a single port-channel per FI.
"and how are the available ports allocated to blade server"
I recall seeing a diagram that shows this allocation, or maybe a view in UCS Manager, but was unable to find it. This is what the Backplane ports view (connectivity of FI-6536 with 100Gb IFM and 2 connections per IOM) looks like (this is on UCS Manager, I don't have an IMM domain to check, but the mapping happens in hardware, so it should be identical).
My suspicion is that every 2nd backplane port shows as down because these blades only have a single primary VIC-15000 installed, and not the additional one in the mezzanine slot.
3. How is the bandwidth allocation between LAN(eth) and SAN (vhba)on the VIC card?
SAN traffic is on a higher QoS so that if there is contention between FC & Ethernet, FC “wins”, because it is more time/latency sensitive. I don't have any more info on how much bandwidth would be consumed by each.
