IBM® BladeCenter® Open Fabric Manager (BOFM) is a solution that enables you to quickly replace and recover blades in your environment.
It does this by assigning Ethernet MAC, Fibre Channel WWN and SAS WWN addresses to the BladeCenter slots in such a way that any blades plugged into those slots take on the assigned addresses. This enables the Ethernet and Fibre Channel infrastructure to be configured once and before any blades are connected to the BladeCenter chassis.
There are two separate offerings of BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager. The main Open Fabric Manager function is provided in the Basic BOFM offering. Additional capabilities are available with the Advanced BOFM V4.x offering.
With Basic Open Fabric Manager, you can pre-assign MAC and WWN addresses, as well as storage boot targets, for up to 100 chassis or 1400 blade servers. Using the management module Web interface, you can create addresses for blade servers, save the addresses to a configuration file, deploy the addresses to the blade slots in the same chassis or in up to 100 different chassis. This can be done without any blade servers installed in the chassis.
With Advanced Open Fabric Manager V4.x, you can monitor the health of blade servers and automatically - without user intervention - replace a failed blade from a designated pool of spare blades. After receiving a failure alert, Advanced BOFM attempts to power off the failing blade, read the BOFM virtualized addresses and boot target parameters, apply these parameters to the next blade in the standby blade pool, and power on the standby blade.
When the switch failover feature is enabled in Advanced BOFM, VLAN configuration on the switch associated with a failed blade is automatically migrated to the switch associated to the standby blade.
You can also pre-assign MAC and WWN addresses, as well as storage boot targets, for up to 256 chassis or 3584 blade servers. Using an enhanced graphical user interface, you can create addresses for blade servers, save the address profiles; deploy the addresses to the blade slots in the same chassis or in up to 100 different chassis. This can be done without any blade servers installed in the chassis. Additionally, you can create profiles for chassis that have not been installed in the environment by simply associating an IP address to the future chassis.