Open Fabric Manager

Select Blade Tasks → Open Fabric Manager to manage interfaces and hardware adapters.

This task is in the navigation panel under Blade Tasks for advanced management modules that are equipped with this feature. If the feature is not activated, you will see a page where you can enter the license key, if you already have one, for your BladeCenter unit, as shown in the following illustration.

Graphic illustrating the open fabric manager license key request page.

If the feature is activated, you will see the open fabric manager configuration page, as shown in the following illustration.

Graphic illustrating the open fabric manager configuration page.

Note: Open Fabric Manager is not a standard management module feature; it is an extra cost feature that requires a license key. To obtain license keys for features that you have purchased for your BladeCenter unit, go to http://licensing.datacentertech.net. This website contains an overview of the BladeCenter licensing process. Once you obtain a license key, you need to install it on the advanced management module (License Manager for information). See the BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager documentation for more detailed information.

Use the Open Fabric Manager to enable and set addressing for hardware adapters, including the MAC addresses of network interface cards and worldwide node names (WWNN) and worldwide port names (WWPN) of Fibre Channel (FC) host bus adapters. You can use this feature to assign virtual addresses for blade bays in each BladeCenter unit. When a blade server is inserted into a blade bay, with Open Fabric Manager enabled for that blade bay, the Open Fabric Manager configuration is automatically assigned to the blade server, and the blade server starts to use the addresses automatically. You can select up to four types of address; Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, Virtual NIC; and the maximum number of blade offsets to support (0 through 3) when multi-width blade servers are installed in the BladeCenter unit.

You can configure the Open Fabric Manager for up to 100 BladeCenter units.