Number of Onboard Administrators in the rack

[rudolfw]

Hello. I've got a question about number of OA needed in the rack. We are planning to have three enclosures within the rack and I'm receiving different recommendations for the number of OA needed for this setup. I read several documents related to C7000 and Onboard Administrators, but there were no ultimate answers to the designing of OA placement in rack environment. There are these possible configurations: - put two OAs into each enclosure to ensure fault-tolerance - put two OAs only in one enclosure and manage whole rack - put one OA into each of three enclosures Could you provide to me some comment to these configurations? Are all these three possible? Which one is most recommended and why? Thank you very much. Rudolf Wolf

[James Henry_5]

Every enclosure ships with one Onboard Administrator management module as standard. You add a 2nd module for redundancy. You can stack enclosures via the separate management uplink/downlink ports which are located in the middle of the 2 onboard administrator modules at the rear of the enclosure. This allows you to graphically view the 3 (max 4) enclosures from within the onboard administrator. Bottom line you need at least 1 OA in each enclosure and then link the enclosuers together. If you lose 1 of the OAs then the monitoring for that enclosure is no longer avalable and the fans will run at max and all power supplies will be active; you will also lose visibility of that enclosure in the graphical view BUT the servers and connectivity will still function.

[chopper3]

Unless your budget is VERY tight I'd always go with the redundant OA. Phil.