16 Introduction
Supported Cluster Configurations
The PowerEdge blade servers support both Fibre Channel and iSCSI cluster 
configurations using either Fibre Channel mezzanine cards or Gigabit 
Ethernet mezzanine cards to connect to the corresponding shared storage 
system in either direct-attached or network-attached environments. 
Direct-Attached Cluster
In a direct-attached cluster, the cluster nodes are directly attached to a single 
storage system. The HBAs (mezzanine cards/daughter cards) in the nodes are 
internally connected to the pass-through modules. The pass-through modules 
are connected by cables directly to the RAID controllers (or storage 
processors) on the storage system.
Figure 1-3 shows the logical components of a direct-attached cluster 
configuration.
Figure 1-3. Direct-Attached Cluster
public network
cluster node
cluster node
pass-through module
private network
chassis connections
storage system
book.book  Page 16  Monday, December 31, 2007  3:41 PM