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Supermicro Blade Network Manager (BNM)

Supermicro’s industry-leading blade server product family is enhanced by a userfriendly software utility for managing every aspect of networking configuration within each SuperBlade or MicroBlade enclosure and across multiple enclosures.

The new Supermicro Blade Network Manager (BNM) is a part of Supermicro’s blade management software suite designed to reduce IT management overheads and manual networking configuration errors within a MicroBlade or SuperBlade enclosure.

BNM offers a single pane of glass to monitor and manage the networking configurations across multiple SuperBlade and MicroBlade enclosures in a data center environment. It provides an overview of the networking topology from each blade server’s perspective and helps to easily manage the Ethernet Blade switches and to diagnostic networking configuration issues.

The volume provisioning of blade server networking can be achieved with the use of templates. Users can define configuration parameters based on a desired type of workload with an existing enclosure and save as a configuration template. When new enclosures are added to the environment, the same configuration can be applied instantly and repeated at scale. In addition, multiple configuration templates, that are optimized for different workloads, can be composed for later deployments.

BNM is a software solution that can be deployed on any physical server or a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux managed through a secured web interface. The BNM software framework is architected with open standards and is flexible to be incorporated into any existing infrastructure management software tools.

BNM communicates with blade networking switches through a RESTful interface. Blade switches can auto-discover the presence of BNM management agent and respond to offer extended software functionalities including auto provisioning of Multi Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG).

BNM Highlights

Simplicity

The BNM dashboard is designed to present the networking topology and configurations in the simplest fashion, the utility requires minimal networking knowledge. Setting up a new network switch in a fresh deployed blade enclosure requires only a few clicks in the BNM web interface.

Scalability

The BNM management agent is scalable to manage up to thousands of SuperBlade and MicroBlade enclosures from a single management interface.

Users can deploy networking configurations for groups of enclosures based on pre-composed templates and be ready to move from testing to production or to make optimizations for different workloads in a short timeframe.

Auto Discovery

The BNM ability to automatically discover SuperBlade and MicroBlade enclosures allows rapid provisioning of blade networking.

Intelligence

BNM learns the connections between blade servers, blade switches as well as uplink TOR or other switches using LLDP and LACP messages. Based on the available connections, BNM can intelligently provision link aggregations in blade switches automatically.

Workflow

BNM includes a template-based configuration capability and provides multiple pre-loaded configuration templates for different network switch models optimized for different application or deployments. These templates can be deployed to multiple enclosures with only few clicks resulting in significant time savings. Modifying a deployed configuration template can automatically trigger the reprovision of all the applicable blade switches.

Analytics

BNM gathers logs and statistics from all the blade switches and presents them with powerful analytical and graphical tools. BNM is built with open source analytical products including Elastic Search, Logstash and Kibana for this purpose.