eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by UCSCsIOMBPTest

The Cisco UCS chassis supports eight blade slots, and each blade has two Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors and up to 96GB of RAM. The chassis also has two SAS drive slots and a RAID controller, plus a connection to the backplane. The chassis is responsible for providing support infrastructure to blades via the backplane connection.

A backplane is a circuit board (usually a printed circuit board) that connects several connectors in parallel to each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete computer system.

In Cisco UCS Manager, all network traffic flows over FCoE directly from the chassis backplane to an FI (Fabric Interconnect) device.

To make sure that the blades in the chassis receive prompt and uninterrupted networking services, you need to frequently check whether the backplane ports of the chassis are available and operational. This test makes this verification possible.

At pre-configured intervals, this test monitors the health of each of the backplane ports in every I/O module of a chassis, and reports whether they are operational or not. Backplane ports experiencing errors, hardware failures, or software failures can thus be identified quickly and accurately.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
OperState Indicates the overall status of the backplane ports present in this I/O Module of the chassis.   This measure reports the status of the backplane ports and their numeric equivalents as shown in the table:

Numeric Value State
0 Indeterminate
1 Up
2 Admin-down
3 Link-down
4 Failed
5 No-license
6 Link-up
7 Hardware-failure
8 Software-failure
9 Error-disabled
10 Sfp-not-present

Note:

By default, this measure reports the above-mentioned States while indicating the status of the backplane ports present in this I/O Module of the chassis. However, the graph of this measure will be represented using the corresponding numeric equivalents of the states i.e., 0 to 10.

The detailed diagnosis of this measure provides the Time, ID, Slot ID, Chassis ID, Fabric ID, Port Type, Role Type, Network Type, Transport Type and Peer details of the I/O Module backplane ports.