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Installing an I/O-expansion card
If I/O-expansion is supported by the BladeCenter unit in which the blade server is
installed, you can add an I/O-expansion card to the blade server. An I/O-expansion
card provides additional connections for communicating on a network.
The single-width type blade server supports one I/O-expansion card of either the
small-form-factor, standard-form-factor, or high-speed design. The double-width type
blade server supports one additional I/O-expansion card of either the
small-form-factor, standard-form-factor, or high-speed design. Some expansion
cards are available as both small-form-factor cards and standard-form-factor cards.
Other expansion cards are available only as standard-form-factor or high-speed
cards. The blade server supports various types of I/O-expansion cards. See
http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/ for a list of available
I/O-expansion cards and their form-factor types.
Note: Some BladeCenter units do not support high-speed expansion cards, see the
documentation for your BladeCenter unit for compatibility information.
You can install one expansion card in the system board of a BladeCenter LS21
Type 7971 or LS41 Type 7972 blade server. Make sure that the I/O modules to
which the I/O-expansion card is mapped support the network-interface type of the
I/O-expansion card. In a blade server with an MPE installed, you can install an
additional small-form-factor card or standard-form-factor expansion card. If the
blade server has an MPE installed, a high-speed expansion can only be installed in
the MPE.
See the ServerProven list at http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/
compat/us/ for a list of available I/O-expansion cards and their form-factor types.
When you add an I/O-expansion card, you must make sure that the I/O-modules it
is mapped to both support the expansion card network-interface type. These
I/O-modules are typically installed in I/O-module bays 3 and 4 on the BladeCenter
unit. For example, if you add an Ethernet expansion card to a blade server installed
in a Type 8677 BladeCenter unit, the I/O-modules in I/O-module bays 3 and 4 on
the BladeCenter unit must both be compatible with the expansion card. All other
expansion cards that are installed on other blade servers in the BladeCenter unit
must also be compatible with these I/O-modules. In this example, you could then
install two Ethernet switch modules, two pass-thru modules, or one Ethernet switch
module and one pass-thru module. Because pass-thru modules are compatible with
a variety of I/O-expansion cards, installing two pass-thru modules would enable the
use of several different types of compatible I/O-expansion cards on blade servers
within the same BladeCenter unit.
The following sections describe how to install an I/O-expansion card in the blade
server.
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Chapter 3. Installing options
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