Monitoring The Initialization Process - Allied Telesis SwitchBlade x3106 Installation Manual

Monitoring the Initialization Process

SwitchBlade x3106 Chassis Switch and AT-SBx31CFC960 Card Installation Guide
The control and line cards perform an initialization process when you
power on or reset the chassis. The process may have up to three phases.
The number of phases and their durations depend on the number of
controller cards in the chassis. There are three possible configurations:
 Configuration 1: Chassis with one controller card.
The initialization process for a chassis with only one controller card
has two phases and takes approximately two minutes. In the first
phase the controller card initializes its management software. In
the second phase the line cards initialize their management
software and receive their configuration settings from the controller
card. The control and line cards begin forwarding network traffic at
the completion of the initialization process.

Configuration 2: Chassis with two controller cards that have
identical configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two controller cards has
three phases. The first two phases are the same as in configuration
1. At their completion, the Ethernet line cards begin to forward
traffic from their ports and the active controller card starts to
forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, each line card
slot has 20Gbps of backplane bandwidth.
In the third phase the inactive controller card synchronizes its
database and load files with the active card. If the databases and
files are already the same, the third phase requires about thirty
seconds, after which the inactive controller card begins to forward
packets across the backplane, which increases the backplane
bandwidth to 40Gbps for each line card slot.
 Configuration 3: Chassis with two controller cards that have
different configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two controller cards has
three phases. At the completion of the first two phases, which are
the same as in configuration 1, the Ethernet line cards begin to
forward traffic from their ports and the active controller card starts
to forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, the backplane
bandwidth is 20Gbps for each line card slot.
During the third phase, the inactive controller card synchronizes its
configuration database and load files with the active controller card.
The length of the third phase depends on the differences in the
files, and may take several minutes to complete. During the
synchronization, the inactive controller card does not forward traffic
on the backplane. Only after it has fully synchronized its files with
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