Brocade Fabric OS Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v6.3.0 (53-1001336-02, November 2009)

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 33

53-1001336-02

Enabling and disabling blades

Port blades are enabled by default. In some cases, you will need to disable a port blade to perform

diagnostics. When diagnostics are executed manually (from the Fabric OS command line), many

commands require the port blade to be disabled. This ensures that diagnostic activity does not

interfere with normal fabric traffic.

If you need to replace an application blade with a different application blade, there are extra steps

you need to take to ensure that the previous configuration is not interfering with your new

application blade.

Enabling blades

1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.

2. Enter the bladeEnable command with the slot number of the port blade you want to enable.

ecp:admin> bladeenable 3

Slot 3 is being enabled

FA4-18 application blade enabling exceptions

The Brocade 48000 director supports up to two FA4-18 blades in a chassis. The Brocade DCX and

DCX-4S Backbones support up to four FA4-18 blades in a chassis.

FC4-48 and FC8-48 port blade enabling exceptions

The FC4-48 port blade is compatible only in the Brocade 48000 director and with the FR4-18i and

FC4-16IP application blades.

Because the area IDs are shared with different port IDs, the FC4-48 and FC8-48 blades support

only F_ and E_Ports. They do not support FL_Ports.

Port swapping on an FC4-48 or FC8-48 is supported only on ports 0–15. For the FC8-32 port blade,

port swapping is supported on all 32 ports. This means that if you replace a 32-port blade where a

port has been swapped on ports 16–31 with a 48-port blade, the 48-port blade faults. To correct

this, reinsert the 32-port blade and issue portSwap to restore the original area IDs to ports 16–31.

FR4-18i application blade enabling exceptions

Note the following exceptions to enabling the FR4-18i application blade:

• You have inserted the FR4-18i blade into a slot that was previously empty or contained an

FA4-18, FC4-16IP, FC4-48, FC8-16, FC8-32, FC8-48, FC10-6, FS8-18.

If the FR4-18i blade is operational and the platform is rebooted, then after the successful

bootup of the system the blade continues operations using the previous configurations.

If a previously configured FR4-18i blade is removed and another or the same FR4-18i blade is

inserted into the same slot, then the ports use the previous configuration and come up

enabled. If you do not want to use the previous configuration, you must clear the configuration

information, remove the blade, and then reseat the blade.