White Papers

Introduction
4 PowerEdge MX7000 Management Module Redundancy | Document ID
Introduction
The purpose of this whitepaper is to describe the MX7000 Management Module (MM) high availability feature
provided by dual MM modules, discuss manual (user initiated) and automatic (system initiated) failovers,
physical identification of active/standby MMs for part replacement scenarios and troubleshooting redundancy
health.
MM Redundancy
The PowerEdge MX7000 with a recommended configuration has dual MMs, each occupying a slot accessible
through the back of the chassis. Redundancy is an optional feature which will automatically establish in a
chassis with dual MMs at the same firmware version. PowerEdge MX7000 chassis with redundancy will have
the benefit of being more resilient management infrastructure.
MM high availability solution is designed using dual MMs (hardware modules) running a two-node
active/standby cluster implemented using
• Linux pacemaker/corosync technologies
• Several cluster aware system services monitored as cluster resources via pacemaker hardware-
based fencing agent for STONITH purposes.
MM network cabling for redundancy
Setup and formation of redundancy
For a single chassis setup, have both MMs inserted into slot 1 and slot 2 on the back of the chassis, connect
the MM Gb ports to the top of rack network switch as show in Figure 1. Setup 1 showing the minimum
cabling required for redundancy and Setup 2 showing (optional) additional cabling for more cable loss
tolerance. Please refer to “PowerEdge MX7000 Chassis Management Network Cabling” whitepaper for
details on multi chassis setup.