Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 51
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Blade swapping 3

Swapping blades

The bladeSwap command performs the following operations:
1. Blade selection
The selection process includes selecting the switch and the blades to be affected by the swap
operation. Figure 2 shows the source and destination blades are identified to begin the
process.
FIGURE 2 Identifying the blades
2. Blade validation
The validation process includes determining the compatibility between the blades selected for
the swap operation:
Blade technology. Both blades must be of compatible technology types (for example, Fibre
Channel to Fibre Channel, Ethernet to Ethernet, application to application, etc).
Port Count. Both blades must support the same number of front ports. For example,
16-ports to 16-ports, 32-ports to 32-ports, 48-ports to 48-ports, and so on.
Availability. The ports on the destination blade must be available for the swap operation
and not attached to any other devices.
3. Port preparation
The process of preparing ports for a swap operation includes basic operations such as insuring
the source and destination ports are offline, or verifying that none of the destination ports
have failed.
The preparation process also includes any special handling of ports associated with logical
switches. For example Figure 3 shows the source blade has ports in a logical switch or logical
fabric, then the corresponding destination ports must be included in the associated logical
switch or logical fabric of the source ports.