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IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager (BOFM) is a tool for simplifying deployment, failover, and repurposing of blade servers. BOFM performs these tasks by controlling the assignment of physical Ethernet MAC and Fibre Channel WWN addresses for the integrated Ethernet interfaces and I/O expansion cards in each blade.

IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager (BOFM) is a tool for simplifying deployment, failover, and repurposing of blade servers. BOFM performs these tasks by controlling the assignment of physical Ethernet MAC and Fibre Channel WWN addresses for the integrated Ethernet interfaces and I/O expansion cards in each blade.

BOFM provides the ability to create predefined configurations for the external infrastructure connections including network switches, SAN switches, storage systems and so on. With BOFM, you can configure MAC-based VLANs and security policies, WWN-based zones on switches, and storage partitions on storage systems by using your own pool of MAC addresses and WWNs created in advance. You can then assign these predefined addresses to a blade's I/O ports with BOFM instead of using burned-in hardware addresses that were assigned during manufacture.

The BOFM 3.0 Advanced Upgrade adds the following features compared to BOFM 2.1 Advanced Upgrade:

• Web-based user interface (based on IBM Systems Director 6.1)
• New Wizards:
• Blade Address Manager Configuration Template Wizard
• Standby Blade Pool Configuration Template Wizard
• CSV configuration file import/export
• Support for evaluation and permanent license keys
• Support for SAS cards and I/O modules
• Support for CIOv cards
• Support for HS22 and JS23/43

Source:  IBM Redbooks at-a-glance guide BOFM