The CFFv is the "daughter card" that goes on the blade to talk with the
"mid-plane" fabric which gets you out to the SAS Controllers that connect to
the Disk Bays on both sides of the BCS. Need to be careful in that you
can't have the SAS controller and Fibre connector at same time in the BCS
blades, because of the placement or perhaps a better word is connectivity to
the I/O modules that are in the Chassis itself.
If you have a router in the BCS, like the Nortel one, by default the
external connections are disabled. You will need to go into the AMM and
allow the external connections from those I/O Module bays.
VIOS takes a long time. If you ordered this correctly, you can get VIOS
preloaded. You want to insure that you have VIOS only loaded on the
internal drives of the JS12, and hopefully you ordered your JS12 with two
disk drives so that you can mirror them. Just load VIOS onto the single
drive at first, and then you can use later start mirroring between the two
internal drives. You MUST have the latest VOIS version, which I forgot what
that is. I thought it was 1.15 but I could be mistaken as I don't have my
notes, Lukas might know.
Remember, that the JS12 are Power blades that act just like our 520s. So
they have an FSP on them, that will take a little time for them to IPL so
that the chassis recognizes the blade as such. There are no firmware
updates for the FSP on the blade yet.
Pete
Pete Massiello
iTech Solutions
http://www.itechsol.com
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 1:34 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: miscellaneous BCS questions
some BCS config questions ...
The Vess Natchev read-me first document mentions the "LSI SAS CFFv"
expansion adapter and that it is needed to use the SAS drives. Is
this the Nortel L2/L3 switch module?
Ethernet lan connection. The AMM is networked to my router. Are
there any other LAN cables to connect to the router? The only other
LAN ports on the back of the BCS are the external ports of the Nortel
switch ( whose purpose compared to the lower cost copper passthru
module is still unclear )
VIOS. When I power up the JS12 blade, about two screen fulls of Unix
style boot messages scroll by on the console monitor. Does this mean
VIOS is installed? I would assume so, but when I used PuTTY to open a
VIOS console I got a blank screen. I followed the steps in Natchev
document, section 5.2.2. env -T blade[1], then "console". After that
the screen stayed blank for more than 5 minutes. So I started the
VIOS install ( which I eventually pulled the plug on because 45
minutes into the install, it was only 50% complete. )
FIRMWARE. I got the AMM firmware, both functional and maintenance
downloaded and installed. But then I was unsure which specific
firmware to download for the other modules. On the IBM support site
there are different firmware files for each model of module the FW
applies to. In the browser connect to the AMM there is a display of
all the modules in the BCS, with their product numbers, serial
numbers, etc. Problem for me is on the IBM support site I did not see
the product numbers the BCS reports in the descriptions or names of
the firmware files. How can I cross reference the product numbers the
BCS reports with the firmware descriptions? ( I guess I will try a
google search on the product numbers )
thanks,
-Steve
midrange.com
