IBM 3110X User Guide - Page 10

Virtual Blade Switch technology Virtual Blade Switch (VBS) technology allows you to combine several physical network switches into one logical entity by using high-speed dedicated stacking ports on these switches to form a high-speed ring. This logical switch appears as a single network device to the blade servers and external network devices. The raw capacity of the ring is 64 Gbps. Actual throughput depends on traffic patterns and traffic type. A sample topology is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. Virtual Blade Switch sample topology A VBS stack has the following major characteristics: z Up to nine physical switches can be combined in one stack: one master switch, and up to eight member switches. z Two dedicated connectors on a switch are used to create VBS, and switches are connected in a ring. Stack connections form two counter-rotating unidirectional links, with up to 32 Gbps of raw capacity per stack member (16 Gbps per ring link). z Single point of management. z All switches in a stack are managed through a single IP address on the master switch. z Single configuration file per stack. z Single software upgrade for entire stack. z Single Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) instance for Layer 2 networks. z Single router for Layer 3 networks. z Consolidation of uplink ports (or uplink sharing). Cisco Catalyst Switch Modules 3110G and 3110X for IBM BladeCenter 10