Fabric Channel Connections Between Fortiswitch-5003A Boards; Fabric Gigabit Switching Between Chassis - Fortinet 5003A Fabric And Base Backplane Communications Manual

FortiGate-5140 fabric backplane communication

Fabric channel connections between FortiSwitch-5003A boards

Fabric gigabit switching between chassis

FortiSwitch-5003A and 5003 Fabric and Base Backplane Communications Guide
01-30000-85717-20081205
When two FortiSwitch-5003A boards are installed in a single chassis their fabric
channels are connected together. This means there is a data connection between
fabric channel 1 and fabric channel 2. Unless you are going to use this connection
you should disable it.
If one or more of the FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards are operating in
transparent mode, the connection between the fabric channels can cause looping.
If you have one or more FortiGate-5001A or 5005FA2 boards operating in
transparent mode with two FortiSwitch-5003A boards in the same chassis you
must disable communication between the FortiSwitch-5003A boards.
The fabric channel connection between the FortiSwitch-5003A boards uses an
internal FortiSwitch-5003A interface called slot-2/1. To disable the fabric channel
connection between two FortiSwitch-5003A boards you should set the status of
slot-2/1 to down for one of the boards. Connect to the CLI of one of the
FortiSwitch-5003A boards and enter the following command:
config switch fabric-channel physical-port
edit slot-2/1
set status down
end
You can use the FortiSwitch-5003A front panel fabric interfaces to provide
10-gigabit data communications between the fabric channels of any combination
of FortiGate-5050 and FortiGate-5140 chassis.
Note: Its not required, but in most cases you would connect the same fabric channels
together. That is you would connect fabric channel 1 on one chassis to fabric channel 1 on
another. Usually you would not connect fabric channel 1 on one chassis to fabric channel 2
on another chassis. Also, you would usually not connect a base channel from one chassis
to a fabric channel on another chassis. You should be careful of looping when connecting
chassis together if some of the FortiGate boards in the chassis are operating in transparent
mode.
Figure 11 shows data communication between two FortiGate-5140 chassis using
fabric channel 1. The top chassis in the figure contains a FortiSwitch-5003A board
in hub/switch slot 1 and six FortiGate-5001A boards. The bottom chassis contains
a FortiSwitch-5003A board also in hub/switch slot 1 and four FortiGate-5005FA2
boards.
The chassis are connected together using the FortiSwitch-5003A F1 front panel
interface in the top chassis and the FortiSwitch-5003A F7 front panel interface in
the bottom chassis.
In this configuration the FortiSwitch-5003A boards are operating as layer-2
switches for fabric channel 1 and the FortiGate-5001A and 5005FA2 boards are
operating as typical standalone FortiGate units.
Fabric channel connections between FortiSwitch-5003A boards
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