Upgrading a DDR Fabric Board to a QDR Fabric Board involves removing the existing Fabric Board from the Fabric Interconnect and replacing with the new QDR Fabric Board. The Fabric Board is not hot swappable, so you will need to power down each Fabric Interconnect that will receive the QDR Fabric Board.
For the upgrade, you will need the following equipment:
#2 Phillips (cross-head) screwdriver
an ESD wrist strap
an ESD-safe workspace for the Fabric Boards when they are not in the Fabric Interconnect. The ESD bag that ships with Oracle modules is an option if a grounded workspace is not available.
Some considerations exist for upgrading a DDR Fabric Board to a QDR Fabric Board:
The QDR Fabric Board has 20 ports instead of the 24 ports on the DDR Fabric Board. Due to the difference in number of ports, data centers that use an SNMP management tool can experience port index number problems (portIfIndex). If your data center uses an SNMP Management tool, you will need to rediscover the devices through the SNMP manager to correctly enumerate the devices' port IDs.
Also, due to the different number of ports on the QDR Fabric Board, you might need to “fan out” the IB network. For example, if your existing DDR Fabric Board has full deployment of 24 servers, the servers connected on ports 21 through 24 cannot be connected directly to the 20-port QDR Fabric Board.
To reconnect the servers that were on ports 21 through 24, you will need to connect an IB expansion switch to one of the ports on the QDR Fabric Board. This IB expansion switch will then fan out the IB network, and allow you re-connect the servers that were on ports 21 through 24 of the DDR Fabric Board.
When the new Fabric Board boots up, QDR fabric ports are brought online at QDR rate if QDR HCAs are installed in the connected servers.
No license key is required to activate the 40 Gbps QDR fabric.
To support the QDR Fabric Board, the Fabric Interconnect must be running XgOS version 3.0 or later. There is no minimum firmware version required on the HCAs, but you should always use the latest version of firmware recommended by Oracle.
See the appropriate section: