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We have Dell M420 Blades with Dell M1000e chasiss ,the backplane has four dell pass-through switches .

On M420 we have Mezzanine card with 4 ethernet ports -

From CMC i see that those Mezzanine 4 ports are assigned as

eth1 and eth3 to C1 (back plane Pass through Switch) eth2 and eth4 to C2 (back plane Pass through Switch)

I can connect a cable to both C1 and C2 and can use eth1 and eth2 -

Question is that how to use rest of two ports i.e. eth3 and eth4 as i tried to put cables in remaining sockets of C1 and C2 but still ethtool shows link down.

Are these for redundancy ? any suggestion ?

Rob Moir
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Zeeshan
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1 Answers1

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There's a clue in the name of the module. A Pass-through I/O card (n.b. not switch) provides a direct mapping between the ethernet cards configured in each blade server and the ethernet port on the back of the module, so if you populate a blade with two ethernet cards in the Mezzanine card modules and connect them to a passthrough module then you've essentially done no more than provide a simple network connection to the back of a server, the same as you would on a conventional rack or tower server. One ethernet port = one network connection.

If you want to make all the ports active then you need to populate all the mezzanine card modules on the blade itself and you need to plug active switches, not pass-through modules, into the M1000e I/O bays.

To read more about passthrough modules, you can look at the wikipedia article on the M1000e blade chassis. It has a section that explains passthrough modules, along with other sections for powerconnect and force10 switches, among others.

Rob Moir
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  • both from CMC of Blade and OS level i see that all four of mezzanine card modules are loaded - here is the output from cmc -slot ----------------------- server assigned --------------- chasis assinged C1 Gigabit Ethernet 00:0A:F7:0B:5A:34 B8:CA:3A:12:AD:31 Gigabit Ethernet 00:0A:F7:0B:5A:36 B8:CA:3A:12:AD:33 C2 Gigabit Ethernet 00:0A:F7:0B:5A:35 B8:CA:3A:12:AD:32 Gigabit Ethernet 00:0A:F7:0B:5A:37 B8:CA:3A:12:AD:34 one each from c1 and c2 i can plug cables to designated slots but how to connected rest of ports both from c1 and c2 ? – Zeeshan Feb 07 '16 at 09:35
  • As I've said already, @Zeeshan, the rest of the ports aren't available to an individual blade if you're using a passthrough I/O module. You need an active switch module for that. You might want to add your details above to your question. They'll be possible to format so that they're readable in the question and you can't do that in a comment. – Rob Moir Feb 07 '16 at 09:44
  • Thanks @RobM - i am new in Servefault - let me add the details in my original question . – Zeeshan Feb 07 '16 at 10:18