IBM® Fabric Manager (IFM) is a solution that enables you to quickly replace and recover IBM BladeCenter® blade servers and IBM Flex System® compute nodes in your environment.
IFM assigns Ethernet MAC, Fibre Channel WWN, and SAS WWN addresses so that any servers plugged into those bays take on the assigned addresses. This enables the Ethernet and Fibre Channel infrastructure to be configured once and before any servers are connected to the chassis.
With IFM, you can monitor the health of servers and automatically - without user intervention - replace a failed server from a designated pool of spare servers. After receiving a failure alert, IFM attempts to power off the failing server, read the IFM virtualized addresses and boot target parameters, apply these parameters to the next server in the standby pool, and power on the standby server.
You can also pre-assign MAC and WWN addresses, as well as storage boot targets, for up to 256 chassis or 3584 servers. Using an enhanced graphical user interface, you can create addresses for servers and save the address profiles. Then, you can deploy the addresses to the bays in the same chassis or in up to 256 different chassis. This can be done without any servers installed in the chassis. Additionally, you can create profiles for chassis that have not been installed in the environment by simply associating an IP address to the future chassis.
To obtain the most up-to-date documentation for this product, go to the IBM Flex Information Center website.