More questions on the speed/duplex between Onboard Administrator(OA) and integrated Lights Out(iLO)

[chuckk281]

We have some questions about how the iLO on each blade and the OA communicate with each other:

Yoji asked:

Hi experts,

Does anyone know how is it determined what speed and duplex of the link between iLO3 and OA ?

On iLO3, I can choose the setting as below.

 Link State:

   Auto Negotiate

   10BaseT

   100BaseT

 Duplex Option:

   Full Duplex

   Half Duplex

But there is no choices for OA.

(NIC option tab of Enclosure TCP/IP settings applies to the external connection, not to iLO, I think.)

OA's internal link to iLO is always set to auto negotiation or something ?

The link speed/duplex is determined only by iLO3 setting ?

Hiro responded:

iLO2 of c-Class blades is set to auto negotiate mode and we cannot change this settings.

(If you change this settings, iLO2 automatically reset to auto negotiate mode.) So, iLO2 and OA is connected at 100Mbps Full Duplex using auto negotiation process.

I believe same rule will be applied on iLO3.

Then along came Monty:

All c-Class iLO connect to the OA with the same speed - 100Mb full-duplex.

All c-7000 OA modules have a 24 port 100Mb switch to connect all sixteen device bays and eight interconnect bays to the OA.

The original c7000 OA only supported negotiating 10/100BaseT and the OA network settings can be configured for fixed speed and duplex.

The new c7000 OA with KVM supports 10/100/1000BaseT and the OA network settings can be configured for fixed speed and duplex if you require 10 or 100Mb on the OA Management port.

Which prompted a question from Eirik:

Just a side question to that statement.

If the OA only has 24 ports internally, what happens if you have doubledense blades ?

Doesn't each "half" of the blade have it's own iLO ?

And Monty responded:

Yes, each server in the Bl2x220c blade has a separate iLO and the blade design includes a small three port 100Mb unmanaged switch to connect the iLO on each of the two servers in the BL2x220c blade to the same device bay port.

The OA reads the server FRU eeprom early in blade discovery - sees the BL2x220c blade model and knows that there are two servers and two iLOs in that device bay.

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Lots of good info. Let us know how iLO and the OA are working for you.