48 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
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Enabling and disabling blades
3

FX8-24 compatibility notes

When you have an FR4-18i and an FX8-24 blade in your chassis, the following guidelines need to
be followed:
•The FR4-18i and Brocade 7500 GbE ports cannot be connected to either the FX8-24 or Brocade
7800 GbE ports. The ports may come online, but they will not communicate with each other.
Running physical cables between the FR4 -18i and FX8-24 blades is not supported.
•The port configuration is maintained separately for the GbE ports of the FR4 -18i and FX8-24
blades. The port configuration data of one blade is never applied to the other type even if an
FX8-24 replaces an FR4-18i in the same slot of a chassis. However, if an FR4 -18i blade is
replaced with an FX8-24 blade and then replaced back with an FR4 -18i, the FR4 -18i previous
IP configuration data would be applied to the new FR4 -18i. The same behavior applies if you
were to replace the FX8-24 with an FX8-24.
•When Virtual Fabrics is disabled, replacing an FR4 -18i with an FX8-24 (and vice-versa) is
allowed without any pre-conditions
•When Virtual Fabrics is enabled (regardless of whether the FR4 -18i or FX8-24 blade is in the
default switch), replacing an FR4 -18i with an FX8-24 (and vice-versa) without rebooting or
power cycling the chassis will fault the blade with reason code 91. However, after blade
removal, if you reboot or power cycle the chassis, inserting the other blade type is allowed.
•The data paths in both blades are interoperable between FC ports. FR4-18i FC ports can
stream data over FX8-24 GbE ports and vice versa.
•The FX8-24 blade cannot co-exist with the FA4-18, FS8-18, and FCOE10-24 blades. For
example, you cannot have an FA4-18 virtual device exported to an edge fabric, getting
encrypted over an FS8-18 blade, and then going over an FX8-24 FCIP distance VE_Port. There
is no software enforcement to detect the above configuration.

Enabling and disabling blades

Port blades are enabled by default. In some cases, you will need to disable a port blade to perform
diagnostics. When diagnostics are executed manually (from the Fabric OS command line), many
commands require the port blade to be disabled. This ensures that diagnostic activity does not
interfere with normal fabric traffic.
If you need to replace an application blade with a different application blade, there are extra steps
you need to take to ensure that the previous configuration is not interfering with your new
application blade.

Enabling blades

1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.
2. Enter the bladeEnable command with the slot number of the port blade you want to enable.
ecp:admin> bladeenable 3
Slot 3 is being enabled