I/O bays 7 - 10 are used for high-speed switch modules such as the Virtual Fabric 10 Gb Switch Module
or Cisco Nexus 4001I Switch Module. These bays are routed internally through midplane connectors to
the ports on CFFh expansion cards (with HS23 blade, I/O bays 7 and 9 are routed to the integrated
10GbE ports on HS23 through LOM Interposer Card). I/O bays 7 - 10 can also be converted to the
standard I/O bays with the Multi-Switch Interconnect Module (MSIM).
The I/O modules must be compatible with the I/O interfaces that are present in the blade servers. For example,
when a Fibre Channel expansion card is installed in a blade server, I/O modules 3 and 4 must also be Fibre
Channel-based (that is, an FC switch module), and vice versa. If you install FC switches in bays 3 and 4, then
any expansion cards that are installed in all other blade servers in the same chassis must be Fibre Channel.
Table 4 shows the connections between the adapter slots in the compute nodes to the switch bays in the
chassis.
Table 4. Adapter to I/O bay correspondence
I/O adapter
in each server
Port on the adapter
Corresponding I/O module bay
in the chassis
Onboard 1 Gb Ethernet
Port 1
I/O bay 1
Port 2
I/O bay 2
Onboard 10 Gb Ethernet (HS23)
Port 1
I/O bay 7
Port 2
I/O bay 9
CIOv adapter
Port 1
I/O bay 3
Port 2
I/O bay 4
CFFh adapter
Port 1
I/O bay 7
Port 2
I/O bay 9
Port 3
I/O bay 8
Port 4
I/O bay 10
Supported I/O modules
Tables 5 through 7 list the I/O modules that are supported by the BladeCenter H chassis and the corresponding
I/O bay into which the I/O module can be installed.
BladeCenter H
9
