Users Guide
Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 89
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Ports
3
The different blades that can be inserted into a chassis are described as follows:
• Control processor (CP) blades contain communication ports for system management, and are
used for low-level, platform-wide tasks.
• Core blades are used for intra-chassis switching as well as interconnecting two Backbones.
• Port blades are used for host, storage, and interswitch connections.
• Application (AP) blades are used for Fibre Channel Application Services and Routing Services,
FCIP, Converged Enhanced Ethernet, and encryption support.
NOTE
On each port blade, a particular port must be represented by both slot number and port number.
The Brocade DCX and DCX 8510-8 each have 12 slots that contain control processor, core, port,
and AP blades:
• Slot numbers 6 and 7 contain CPs.
• Slot numbers 5 and 8 contain core blades.
• Slot numbers 1 through 4 and 9 through 12 contain port and AP blades.
The Brocade DCX-4S and DCX 8510-4 each have 8 slots that contain control processor, core, port,
and AP blades:
• Slot numbers 4 and 5 contain CPs.
• Slot numbers 3 and 6 contain core blades.
• Slot numbers 1 and 2, and 7 and 8 contain port and AP blades.
When you have port blades with different port counts in the same Backbone (for example, 16-port
blades and 32-port blades, or 16-port blades and 18-port blades with 16 FC ports and 2 GbE ports,
or 16-port and 48-port blades), the area IDs no longer match the port numbers.
Table 7 on page 96 lists the port numbering schemes for the blades.
Setting port names
Perform the following steps to specify a port name. For Backbones, specify the slot number where
the blade is installed.
1. Connect to the switch and log in using an account with admin permissions.
2. Enter the portName command.
ecp:admin> portname 1/0 trunk1
Port identification by slot and port number
The port number is a number assigned to an external port to give it a unique identifier in a switch.
To select a specific port in the Backbones, you must identify both the slot number and the port
number using the format slot number/port number. No spaces are allowed between the slot
number, the slash (/), and the port number.
Example of enabling port 4 on a blade in slot 2
ecp:admin> portenable 2/4