About Port Assignments on a Blade Server

Interconnect modules and bays

Interconnect modules in a blade server system that Secure Web Gateway can run on can be:

• Pass-through modules (HP 1Gb Ethernet Pass-Thru Modules)
• Switches (HP GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switches, also known as LAN interconnects)

The number of ports that can be physically provided by an interconnect module is 16 for a pass-through module and 5 for a switch. An M3 enclosure model has 4 interconnect bays, an M7 model has 8. This means the number of ports in a blade server system can vary between 20 and 128.
 

Network interface and cards

There can be up to 8 network interfaces embedded on the system board and two additional (Mezzanine) cards:

• 2 LoM (LAN on motherboard) network interfaces embedded on the system board
• 2 network interfaces on Mezzanine card 1
• 4 network interfaces on Mezzanine card 2

An enclosure can hold up to 16 blade servers. This means the number of network interfaces in a blade server system can vary between 2 (only one blade server with only the system board card in an enclosure) and 128.

So all kinds of matches and mismatches between the number of ports and the number of network interfaces can occur. There can be a port for every network interface, there can be fewer ports than network interfaces, but also more.

Mapping network interfaces, ports, and interconnect bays

The ports for the network interfaces on a blade server are always mapped in the same way to the interconnect bays that are the locations of the interconnect modules.

For example, the port for the first network interface on the system board of a blade server is always mapped to the first interconnect bay of an enclosure.

As the M3 enclosure model only has 4 interconnect bays, 2 ports of a blade server are mapped to the same interconnect if the blade server is fully equipped with 8 network interfaces on 3 network interface cards. The mapping is not completely straightforward.

This mapping is shown in the following table:

On the M7 enclosure model, which has 8 interconnect bays, the mapping is as shown in the following table:

Port assignments

The following table shows the ports that are assigned to the network interfaces on a G6 blade server model and the names of the network interfaces that are used by the operating system.

The network interface card models are also shown.

The last table shows the port assignments on the G8 blade server model.