Dell PowerEdge M1000e Technical Manual

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Contents

Dell PowerEdge M1000e Technical Manual Manual pdf 26 page image

26 PowerEdge M1000e Technical Guidetransmit positive signal, a transmit negative signal, a receive positive signal, and a receivenegative signal. Differential pair signaling provides improved noise immunity for these high speedlanes. Various terminology is used by fabric standards when referring to lanes. PCIe calls this alane, InfiniBand calls it a physical lane, and Fibre Channel and Ethernet call it a link. A link is defined here as a collection of multiple fabric lanes used to form a singlecommunication transport path between I/O end devices. Examples are two-, four- andeight-lane PCIe, or four-lane 10GBASE‐KX4. PCIe, InfiniBand and Ethernet call this a link. Thedifferentiation has been made here between lane and link to prevent confusion over Ethernet’suse of the term link for both single and multiple lane fabric transports. Some fabrics such as FibreChannel do not define links as they simply run multiple lanes as individual transports forincreased bandwidth. A link as defined here provides synchronization across the multiple lanes,so they effectively act together as a single transport. A port is defined as the physical I/O end interface of a device to a link. A port can have single ormultiple lanes of fabric I/O connected to it.Quantities and prioritiesThere are three supported high-speed fabrics per M1000e half-height server module, with twoflexible fabrics using optional plug-in mezzanine cards on the server, and one connected to theLOMs on the server. The ports on the server module connect through the midplane to theassociated I/O modules (IOM) in the back of the enclosure, which then connect to LAN/SAN/IPCnetworks.The optional mezzanine cards are designed to connect through the eight-lane PCIe to the servermodule’s chipset in most cases. Mezzanine cards have either one dual port ASIC with four- or eight-lane PCIe interfaces or dual ASICs, each with four-lane PCIe interfaces. External fabrics are routedthrough high-speed, 10Gbps-capable air dielectric connector pins through the planar and midplane.For best signal integrity, the signals isolate transmit and receive signals for minimum crosstalk.Differential pairs are isolated with ground pins and signal connector columns are staggered tominimize signal coupling.The M1000e system management hardware and software includes fabric consistency checking,preventing accidental activation of any misconfigured fabric device on a server module. The systemwill automatically detect a misconfiguration and alert you of the error. No damage occurs to thesystem, and you can reconfigure the faulted module.M1000e I/O is fully scalable to current and future generations of server modules and I/O Modules.There are three redundant multi-lane fabrics in the system, as illustrated in Figure 13.In its original configuration, the M1000e midplane is enabled to support up to four Gigabit Ethernetlinks per server module on Fabric A. Thus, potential data bandwidth for Fabric A is 4 Gbps perhalf-height server module. A future midplane upgrade may enable higher bandwidth on Fabric A.The M1000e provides full 10/100/1000M Ethernet support when using Ethernet pass-throughmodules enabling you to connect to any legacy infrastructure whether using Ethernet pass-throughor switch technology. This technical advance uses in-band signaling on 1000Base-KX transport andrequires no user interaction for enablement.