Fabric Manager Users Guide, Version 6.1, Revision A - QLogic

1–Overview of the QLogic Fabric Manager Suite
Embedded and Host Solutions
The FE then uses in-band InfiniBand packets to communicate with the other
managers (SM, PM, BM). The FE does not have to run on the same host as the
other managers.
Embedded and Host Solutions
The QLogic Fabric Manager suite is able to be deployed as either a host-based or
an embedded solution. The host solution uses an InfiniBand stack and an Host
Channel Adapter to access, and manage the fabric. The embedded solution
resides on an internally managed switch, and uses a switch port to access and
manage the fabric.
Host QLogic Fabric Manager
The host QLogic Fabric Manager deploys all QLogic Fabric Manager components
on a Linux server. The QLogic Fabric Manager components are applications that
run in the user space, and access the InfiniBand stack using the management
datagram (MAD) interface provided by that stack.
The host QLogic Fabric Manager can manage both small and large fabrics. It is
ideal for managing large fabrics, as the QLogic Fabric Manager software is able to
make use of the large memory resources and high speed processor technology of
standard servers.
The host QLogic Fabric Manager is installed onto a Linux system as part of the
QLogic InfiniBand Fabric Suite installation. The utilities are installed into the
/opt/qlogic_fm/bin directory. The configuration file is installed as
/etc/sysconfig/qlogic_fm.xml. It is started, restarted, and stopped using
the /etc/init.d/qlogic_fm utility (which standard linux commands such as
"service" can use) with the “start”, “restart”, or “stop” parameter, respectively.
The QLogic FastFabric application can configure and control the host QLogic
Fabric Manager, query the SA, and analyze fabric configuration and status. In
addition, there are a few host QLogic Fabric Manager control applications which
are installed in /opt/qlogic_fm/runtime that will be discussed later in this
guide.
Embedded QLogic Fabric Manager
The embedded QLogic Fabric Manager deploys all of the QLogic Fabric Manager
components as an embedded solution in a managed edge switch or the
management module of a QLogic 12000 core switch. The embedded QLogic
Fabric Manager is able to manage small to moderate size fabrics, as the
performance of the embedded software is limited by onboard memory and
management processor constraints (refer to the QLogic 12000 Firmware Release
Notes for more information). For the small to moderate fabrics, the embedded
QLogic Fabric Manager is ideal in that the fabric is able to utilize an existing
resource for the embedded QLogic Fabric Manager purposes.
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