Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
21
Connectivity Between Blades and Fabric Extenders
Cisco UCS Fabric Extenders bring the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing multiple 10
Gigabit Ethernet connections between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics,
cabling, and management.
The Fabric Extenders extend the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6100 and 6200 Series Fabric
Interconnects and the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic Fibre
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Since the fabric extender is
similar to a distributed line card, it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the
fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis, reducing overall infrastructure
complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches
needed, reducing TCO and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single, highly available management
domain.
The Fabric Extenders also manage the chassis environment (the power supply and fans as well as the
blades) in conjunction with the fabric interconnect. Therefore, separate chassis management modules are
not required.
The Fabric Extenders fit into the back of the Cisco UCS 5108 chassis. Each Cisco UCS 5108 chassis can
support up to two fabric extenders, allowing increased capacity and redundancy.
Connectivity between each unique blade and the Fabric Extenders varies according to the type of blade, its
available adapter card slots, and the type of card plugged into each slot. See the individual blade server
spec sheets for detailed connectivity information and connectivity diagrams at this link:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10280/products_data_sheets_list.html
The following sections show generally how the various blade connect to the Fabric Extenders.
