Getting Ready › Release Notes › New in This Release › Backbone Fabric Controller (BFC) New Features › Network Configuration Diagnostics

Network Configuration Diagnostics

The Hardware tab of the Server Properties Page in the BFC has been enhanced to display more information about NICs found during server discovery by the BFC.

In previous releases, this page only displayed information about the backbone and external networks. Now it includes detailed information for all discovered servers, including:

• MAC address
• Network type
• IP Address
• Interface type
• NIC speed
• Switch ID
• Switch type
• Switch protocol
• STP port

Reviewing this diagnostic data helps you analyze potential server issues, for example:

• When a grid fails due to a network problem.
• When a system is quarantined due to network problems detected during discovery.

Additional information helps you diagnose configuration issues, for example, to check if two NICs use the same switch ID. The information also helps you easily identify your backbone and external networks.

You can customize the display of this information using a drop-down menu that appears when you click to the right of any column name.

Notes:

• For more information, see Review Network Configuration Data in the Backbone Fabric Controller (BFC) User Guide.
• Due to the additional checks done as part of this new functionality, some non-compliant configurations previously allowed are now disallowed. Although these configurations were allowed in the past, they did not function reliably.

  The following configurations are now disallowed:

  • A server with the STP switch protocol detected on the backbone NIC
  • A server with the STP switch protocol detected on the external NIC, unless the port in question is configured as “portfast” or “edge port”
  • A server with a backbone NIC with a speed of less than 1Gbps