C-7000 NIC/FC Backplane Routing

[DerekS_1]

I'd like to get a little clarification on how the LOB 10G NICs are routed on the Bl495 G5 in the C-7000 enclosure.

I see from the Flex-10 module that the LOB NICs are routed to interconnect bays 1 and 2. But what I'm unclear about is whether both NICs have electrical connections to both bays, or whether one port is hard wired only to bay 1 and the other to bay 2.

I'm looking at this from a redundancy perspective. If a module in bay 1 dies, does that kill half the phyiscal NIC ports or do they get re-routed to bay 2 with little to no interruption?

Same question for the Virtual Connect Fibre Channel modules. If I pull out one VC FC module, does that take down half the HBA ports or do all get rerouted to the other bay?

[Adrian Clint · Accepted solution]

Hardwired. No re-routing in a backplane.
Same for all blades and all interconnects.
Any re-routing is done in multipathing or fault tolerant drivers in the OS.

[Adrian Clint]

I should have added that Virtual Connect does have some automatic re-routing ability. But this only covers loss of the cables out of the module or some of NIC port chips on the module. It does not cover failure of the module.