As Terry says, you can chose to use these as host ports. You may see this flagged up in SI or Control HealthChecks as it is technically against best practices, but the nodes will use the midplane to communicate as a priority and only fail back to Fibre channel if:
1: the midplane PCIe bus is faulty or connections are failing
2: you have more than 1 IO Group
3: you are using Hyperswap (a subset of item 2)
If this is a single IO Group system, then using all FC ports for host connectivity is valid, however, we do still recommend setting up a port mask to allow the node to node traffic to use FC as a backup to the PCIe direct attach, however, it will not be isolated and can be impacted by host connectivity in the event that we do fail the midplane PCIe node to node traffic.
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Evelyn Perez
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
IBM Storage Virtualize Software Architect for SVC and FlashSystem
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu December 19, 2024 12:24 PM
From: Terry Paone
Subject: Inquiry regarding Port (Inter-node) of FS7300
Not problematic, those ports will work as host ports.
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Terry Paone
Original Message:
Sent: Thu December 19, 2024 05:22 AM
From: SUNG EUN KIM
Subject: Inquiry regarding Port (Inter-node) of FS7300
Hi, Team
Currently, the customer is planning to introduce FS7300, and among the components, two 32 Gb FC 4 Port Adapter Cards (Pair) will be installed.
I plan to connect this to the SAN Switch and assign it to the Host.
However, looking at the FlashSystem document, in the case of 8 ports, Ports 3/4 are used for inter-node purposes.
I am curious about the ports used for inter-node communication and wondering if it would be problematic to connect these ports to the Host.
Thanks.
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SUNG EUN KIM
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