IBM BLADECENTER OPEN FABRIC MGR

IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager allows you to reassign the Ethernet MAC addresses and Fibre Channel WWN addresses used by the I/O ports on server blades in IBM BladeCenter. This is accomplished via a combination of firmware installed in the BladeCenter Advanced Management Module, BIOS software installed in the server blades, and firmware in the I/O expansions cards. Instead of being restricted to use only the addresses that are assigned at the time the I/O devices are manufactured, the administrator can control which addresses are used by each of the I/O ports on the blades. In addition, other I/O-related address and control parameters such as boot device addresses and VLAN tags can also be assigned to individual devices under control of IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager. The address and parameter assignments can be easily changed in order to simplify typical server, network, and storage administration tasks associated with dynamic provisioning, resource reconfiguration, and blade replacement/failover.