Dell PowerConnect Brocade 300 Fabric OS Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 - Page 85

Ports 3 The different blades that can be inserted into a chassis are described as follows: • Control processor blades (CPs) contain communication ports for system management, and are used for low-level, platform-wide tasks. • Core blades are used for intra-chassis switching as well as interconnecting two Backbones. • Port blades are used for host, storage, and interswitch connections. • AP blades are used for Fibre Channel Application Services and Routing Services, FCIP, Converged Enhanced Ethernet, and encryption support. NOTE On each port blade, a particular port must be represented by both slot number and port number. The Brocade DCX and DCX 8510-8 each have 12 slots that contain control processor, core, port, and AP blades: • Slot numbers 6 and 7 contain CPs. • Slot numbers 5 and 8 contain core blades. • Slot numbers 1 through 4 and 9 through 12 contain port and AP blades. The Brocade DCX-4S and DCX 8510-4 each have 8 slots that contain control processor, core, port, and AP blades: • Slot numbers 4 and 5 contain CPs. • Slot numbers 3 and 6 contain core blades. • Slot numbers 1 and 2, and 7 and 8 contain port and AP blades. When you have port blades with different port counts in the same Backbone (for example, 16-port blades and 32-port blades, or 16-port blades and 18-port blades with 16 FC ports and 2 GbE ports, or 16-port and 48-port blades), the area IDs no longer match the port numbers. Table 6 on page 94 lists the port numbering schemes for the blades. Configuring two Ethernet ports on one CP8 blade This feature bonds the two external Ethernet ports of a CP8 blade together as a single logical network interface. This uses an active-standby failover model to provide automatic failover support for the primary Ethernet port on the blade. Basically, if the primary Ethernet port fails (due to something other than power loss), the second Ethernet port immediately takes over to ensure link layer communication is retained The bonding functions as follows: the bonding driver selects one of the physical ports as an active interface by inspecting the physical link state reported by the PHY. Once this is done, all traffic is transmitted over the active interface. The second interface is set as the standby interface and no traffic is transmitted over it unless the active interface is determined to be no longer connected; at this point the second interface is made active. When active, all the Fabric OS kernel modules and applications on the CP8 will use this logical network interface named "bond0" instead of "eth0". NOTE On bootup, physical port eth0 is always made active if it is connected. Fabric OS Administrator's Guide 85 53-1002745-02