Cisco Catalyst Switch Modules 3110G and 3110X for IBM BladeCenter
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Virtual Blade Switch technology
Virtual Blade Switch (VBS) technology allows you to combine several physical network switches into one
logical entity by using high-speed dedicated stacking ports on these switches to form a high-speed ring.
This logical switch appears as a single network device to the blade servers and external network devices.
The raw capacity of the ring is 64 Gbps. Actual throughput depends on traffic patterns and traffic type. A
sample topology is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Virtual Blade Switch sample topology
A VBS stack has the following major characteristics:
Up to nine physical switches can be combined in one stack: one master switch, and up to eight
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member switches.
Two dedicated connectors on a switch are used to create VBS, and switches are connected in a ring.
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Stack connections form two counter-rotating unidirectional links, with up to 32 Gbps of raw capacity
per stack member (16 Gbps per ring link).
Single point of management.
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All switches in a stack are managed through a single IP address on the master switch.
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Single configuration file per stack.
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Single software upgrade for entire stack.
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Single Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) instance for Layer 2 networks.
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Single router for Layer 3 networks.
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Consolidation of uplink ports (or uplink sharing).
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