Technical Product Specification

Intel
®
Server Board S2400EP TPS Platform Management Functional Overview
Revision 2.0 Intel order number G50763-002
67
The NC-SI is a DMTF industry standard protocol for the side band management LAN interface.
This protocol provides a fast multi-drop interface for management traffic.
The baseboard NIC(s) are connected to a single BMC RMII/RGMII port that is configured for
RMII operation. The NC-SI protocol is used for this connection and provides a 100 Mb/s full-
duplex multi-drop interface which allows multiple NICs to be connected to the BMC. The
physical layer is based upon RMII, however RMII is a point-to-point bus whereas NC-SI allows 1
master and up to four slaves. The logical layer (configuration commands) is incompatible
with RMII.
The server board will provide support for a dedicated management channel that can be
configured to be hidden from the host and only used by the BMC. This mode of operation is
configured via a BIOS setup option.
6.9.3.2.2 Dedicated Management Channel
An additional LAN channel dedicated to BMC usage and not available to host SW is supported
via an optional RMM4 add-in card. There is only a PHY device present on the RMM4 add-in
card. The BMC has a built-in MAC module that uses the RGMII interface to link with the card’s
PHY. Therefore, for this dedicated management interface, the PHY and MAC are located in
different devices.
The PHY on the RMM4 connects to the BMC’s other RMII/RGMII interface (that is, the one that
is not connected to the baseboard NICs). This BMC port is configured for RGMII usage.
In addition to the use of an RMM4 add-in card for a dedicated management channel, on
systems that support multiple Ethernet ports on the baseboard, the system BIOS provides a
setup option to allow one of these baseboard ports to be dedicated to the BMC for
manageability purposes. When this is enabled, that port is hidden from the OS.
6.9.3.2.3 Concurrent Server Management Use of Multiple Ethernet Controllers
The BMC FW supports concurrent OOB LAN management sessions for the following
combination:
 Two on-board NIC ports
 One on-board NIC and the optional dedicated RMM4 add-in management NIC.
 Two on-board NICs and optional dedicated RMM4 add-in management NIC.
All NIC ports must be on different subnets for the above concurrent usage models.
MAC addresses are assigned for management NICs from a pool of up to three MAC addresses
allocated specifically for manageability.
The server board has seven MAC addresses programmed at the factory for S2400EP4. MAC
addresses are assigned as follows:
 NIC 1 MAC address (for OS usage)
 NIC 2 MAC address = NIC 1 MAC address + 1 (for OS usage)