The UCS B200-M3 blade is the third generation blade for Cisco, build around the Intel E5-2600 processor. It is a half-width blade that supports dual socket E5 processors with 24 DIMMs that can provide a whopping 768GB of memory.
New to the B200-M3 are an internal USB and dual Flash Card slots. The 24 DIMM slots deliver 768GB or memory when populated with 32GB DIMMs (which will not be available day one). Also new for the B200 is a modular LOM (Lan on Motherboard) which provides the network IO for the blade. There is also room for an extra mezzanine card that can be used for IO or can be used in the future for other purposes.
While technically an optional component, I expect that all but a few customers will order the blades with the mLOM. The mLOM that ships day one is the Cisco VIC1240.
The VIC1240 mLOM has 8 10Gb interfaces that can be used by the blade, 4 of these go to A-side fabric and the other 4 go to the B side fabric (this also requires the use of a special mezzanine card called the “Port-Expander” on the blade). The actual number of available/active 10Gb interfaces depend on the IO Module used in the chassis. With the 2208XP IO Modules in the chassis, the 8*10Gb interfaces are available to the blade.
For those customers that require redundancy of the mezzanine/LOM itself, an extra VIC1280 mezzanine card can be installed on the B200-M3 that will provide IO connectivity in addition to that what the VIC1240 mLOM provides. While this does not increase the number of 10Gb interfaces (it stays at 8 for the blade), it does deliver those 8 10Gb interfaces through two physical separate cards (one mLOM and one Mezzanine). If that level of redundancy is important to you, that is now available on the half-width B200-M3 blades.
The details of all of the B200-M3s network connectivity will be covered in a later post, including all of the options on how the bandwidth is delivers to a blade. It requires more detail then intended for this post.
Now before you flame me and say “those 8 10Gb interfaces are going to require a lot of expensive infrastructure components”, let me cover that.
Remember the UCS architecture, each chassis has two separate IO Modules (fabric A and B) and that is all a chassis needs. There is no room, nor need, to plug in 4/6/8 expensive IO modules just to deliver extra bandwidth. The UCS chassis was developed with a mid plane that already had all of the copper traces to support four 10G-KR lanes from each IO Module to each half-width slot. The current shipping 2208XP IO Module make use of all those 10Gb-KR lanes. If you have been deploying the 2208XP IO Module, you can now take advantage of that extra bandwidth simply by using the B200-M3 with the VIC1240 mLOM.
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