Lenovo BladeCenter H Product Manual page 8

I/O architecture
The BladeCenter H chassis provides connection paths between the server blade bays and I/O bays through a
hardwired dual redundant midplane.
The BladeCenter H chassis has two types of fabrics inside:
Standard fabric (I/O bays 1, 2, 3, and 4)
High-speed fabric (I/O bays 7, 8, 9, and 10)
The BladeCenter H chassis has a total of 10 I/O bays. Each blade bay has a total of eight dedicated connection
paths to the I/O modules, as shown in the following figure.
Figure 4. BladeCenter H I/O topology
The bays are:
Bays 1 and 2 support only standard Ethernet-compatible I/O modules. These bays are routed internally
to the onboard Ethernet controllers on the blades.
Bays 3 and 4 can be used either for standard switch or pass-through modules (such as 8 Gb Fibre
Channel or Gigabit Ethernet modules) or for bridge modules. These bays are routed internally to the CIOv
connector on the blades.
Bays 5 and 6 are dedicated for bridge modules only and do not directly connect to the blade bays.
Bridge modules provide links to the I/O bays 7 - 10 and can be used as additional outputs for I/O
modules in those bays. If I/O bays 3 and 4 are used for bridge modules, they are not directly connected
to the blades, and bay 3 provides redundancy for bay 5, and bay 4 provides redundancy for bay 6.
BladeCenter H 8