Installing & Connecting UCS

Installing Fabric Interconnects

A pair of fabric Interconnects is installed either on single rack or distributed across two racks, Inorder to provide rack and power redundancy. 

Each Interconnects include two redundant hot-swappable power supply units.  It should be ensured that power supply in rack must come from two different energy sources and installed with redundant power distribution unit (PDU). It requires a maximum of 750 Watts of Power.

In UCS, Fabric extenders are used to connect the blade server chassis to fabric Interconnect. The I/O Modules acts as remote line card to fabric Extenders. Maximum of 8 link can be used in order to connect Fabric Module to Fabric Extender in straight through mode. The I/O module cannot be cross connected to other FI. Depending upon the IOM module, there can be 1,2,4,8 Links from IOM module to a single Fabric Interconnects. These Links can also be connected in a port-channel for BW aggregation.

• In IOM/FEX (2208 XP) there will be 8 ports facing the FI and 32 ports facing the blades. Because we have max 8 half blades or 4 full blades in a chassis. On any card we can have max 8 ports (4 towards IOM-A and 4 towards IOM-B). So 8 blades x 4 ports on each blade = 32 Ports.
• It means that we do have oversubscription ratio of 8:32.

Below figure shows how FI’s are connected to IOM.