6-16 User Guide for the Avaya P580 and P882 Multiservice Switches, v6.1
Chapter 6
80-Series Forwarding Engines
The Forwarding Engines are numbered starting at one and increased by one
for each Forwarding Engine. The Supervisor module always has
Forwarding Engines numbered one and two. For a 7-slot P580 switch,
numbers one and two for the Supervisor module and up to eight per media
module slot for a maximum total of 50 Forwarding Engines. For a 17-slot
P882, numbers one and two for the Supervisor module and up to eight for
each of the media modules, for a maximum total of 130. The numbering
sequence will vary depending on the type and total number of media
modules. If the switch has empty slots the numbering sequence is bypassed
for the empty slots.
Fabric Ports The P580/P882 has two backplane connections or ports for each media
module. These ports connect the media modules to the backplan e Cross Bar
Switch Fabric, which in turn connects all modules to all other modules and
ports. These ports are referred to as “Switch Fabric Ports”. There are two
Switch Fabric ports per media module slot (slots 2 through 7, or slots 2-17)
and one fabric port for the Supervisor slot (slot 1) (Figure6-7).Each 80-
series media module can use up to two fabric ports in the slot, the number of
Forwarding Engines to fabric ports varies with the media module. There is
anywhere from one to four Forwarding Engines per fabric port for each 80-
series media module (Table 6 -3).
The number of Forwarding Engines are distributed among the ports for 80-
series modules. The 80-series 10/100 Mbps media modules are distributed
with 12 10/100 ports for each Forwarding engine. For example, the 48 port
10/100 media module has four Forwarding Engines. The first 12 (1-12)
ports are on the first Forwarding Engine, the second 12 (13-24) are on the
second Forwarding Engine, which in turn use one fabric port, the third and
fourth grouping of 12 ports each have a Forwarding Engine and use the
second fabric port. The Forwarding Engines are distributed on a one to one
basis for the 80-series Gigabit media modules. For example the 8 po rt 1000
TX, the first four ports have four Forwarding Engines, one f or eac h Gigabit
port (1-4), and uses one fabric port, the other four ports (5-8) also have four
Forwarding Engines, which use the second fabric port.
50-series Forwarding Engines and Fabric Ports
On a 50-series layer 3 module, each fabric port has two Forwarding
Engines, one for layer 3 traffic, and on e for layer 2 traffic. All layer 3 traffic
will be associated with one Forwarding Engine and all the layer 2 traffic
will be associated with the other Forwarding Engine.
Example, the twelve-port 10/100 layer 3 50-series media module, layer 3
traffic is coming in the first port and the last port, (ports 1,12) . Using the 80-
series even distribution, the first six ports are associated with one FE and
the second six ports with the second FE, and distributed across both fabric
ports.