I/O expansion cards

The illustrations show installation of the SAS connectivity card in the system board; installing the card in an expansion unit is similar.

The blade server supports various types of I/O expansion cards. See http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/ for a list of available I/O expansion cards and their form-factor types. The following notes describe information that you must consider when you install an I/O expansion card:

• The system board supports two I/O expansion cards. The supported cards are the SAS connectivity card and the high-speed expansion card.
• If an expansion unit is installed, you cannot install a high-speed expansion card in the blade server; however, some expansion units do support installation of additional I/O expansion cards. See the documentation for your expansion unit for information.

Make sure that the BladeCenter® unit and the I/O modules to which the I/O expansion card is mapped support the network-interface type of the I/O expansion card. For example, if you add an Ethernet expansion card to a blade server in a Type 8677 BladeCenter unit, the I/O modules in I/O-module bays 3 and 4 on the BladeCenter unit must both be compatible with the expansion card. All other expansion cards that are installed in other blade servers in the BladeCenter unit must also be compatible with these I/O modules. In this example, you can then install two Ethernet switch modules, two pass-thru modules, or one Ethernet switch module and one pass-thru module. Because pass-thru modules are compatible with a variety of I/O expansion cards, installing two pass-thru modules enables the use of several types of compatible I/O expansion cards in blade servers within the same BladeCenter unit.