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 New to IBM – FS 5300 PBR/PBHA Cross Connections

William Thousand's profile image
William Thousand posted Fri September 19, 2025 10:10 AM

I apologize if this is a basic question, but I’m new to IBM Storage so, just trying to get the basics.

We purchased a pair of FS 5300s with the 4-Port 10GB Ethernet add-on adapters. (We have no FC gear)

I see in the documentation you can connect two units directly (without a switch) with FC but it doesn’t mention if the same works for the 10GB 4-port adapter? But I also saw mentioned somewhere if you connect them directly with the 10GB ports you can use NVMe/RDMA connections?

So, I’m just wondering if a) you can use the 10GB ports with DAC cables to cross connect the units and b) if so, is it required to use all four ports on all the nodes (8 cables) and have redundant links or would two ports per node suffice?

Lastly, how does the IP addressing work for all these cross connections either with or without a switch?

Dag Kvello's profile image
Dag Kvello

Did You get an answer to this ?

I have done a two-site FS5300 10GB RDMA/PBHA implementation and in the case of Direct-connect You can only connect one 10GB port pr node in System FS01 to one 10GB port in a node in System FS02. You can not have two pr. node From System FS01 to System FS02. That only works with Fiber channel.

Originally, I had on FS01 and FS02 these four ports:

Link     Config
1        FS01 P1 Node1 (10.1.1.10/24) -> FS02 P1 Node1 (10.1.1.20/24)
2        FS01 P2 Node1 (10.1.2.10/24) -> FS02 P2 Node1 (10.1.2.20/24)
3        FS01 P1 Node2 (10.1.3.10/24) -> FS02 P1 Node2 (10.1.3.20/24)
4        FS01 P2 Node2 (10.1.4.10/24) -> FS02 P2 Node2 (10.1.4.20/24)

I physically connected them so that the IP subnets aligned (The port on A - 10.1.1.10 - connected to the port on B - 10.1.1.20) and so forth

I was able to ping all IP addresses on FS02 from FS01

I created two portsets on both system, each containing two ports each on FS01 (P1N1+P1N2, P2N1+P2N2) and then the same on FS02

The partnership came up (I used two portsets - PBHA-PS01, PBHA-PS02 - in the partnership link) but immediately went to a "Degraded link" status.

This is because the target Discovery service tried to connect from both the ports on FS01 in PBHA-PS1 to the first address in FS02's PBHA-PS01.

This, of course fails since this is direct-connect and there is no switch/router in between. So, as soon as I removed one link pr. portset, the RDMA partnership turned green.

In any case, use FC cards for Direct-connect when implementing PBHA, no matter what You use for host connections (Ethernet or FC). Or, use a switch/switch-stack on each side and keep the ip-adresses in the same subnet.