I/O expansion cards
Use this information to install an I/O expansion card, such as a SAS connectivity card, in the blade server.
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 has two I/O expansion connectors on the system board. One connector supports horizontal combination-form-factor (CFFh) expansion cards and the other connector supports vertical-combination-I/O (CIOv) expansion cards. See http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/ for a list of available I/O expansion cards for your blade server.
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, 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 in the BladeCenter unit. 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.