How To Reserve A Chassis, Test Module And A Port On The Vulcan Bay Box

CHASSIS RESOURCES

Chassis resource can be either be the entire chassis, a test module card on the chassis or a test port on a module.

Xena test equipment supports multiple simultaneous connections from any mixture of Xena clients, such as the Vulcan Manager, scripting clients, etc. As soon as a user/client has successfully established a connection to the chassis, any chassis resource can be inspected. However, in order to change the resource configuration, the resource must first be reserved by the user/client.

Reservation Mechanism

Only one client can reserve a particular resource at a time. The reservation will be active even if the client is disconnected. If the client reconnects later and identifies itself with the same username, any such “left- over” reservations will automatically be transferred to the new connection.

The reservation belongs to a combination of the connection ID in the chassis and the specified username. The username is simply used as a tag for the reserved resource, and the chassis has no notion of actual “user accounts”. Multiple connections could use the same name, but any resource will only be reserved to one connection at a time.

The default username for the Vulcan Manager is the Windows username for the current user. You can change the username for Vulcan Manager in the Options menu. The username can contain up to 8 characters.

Reserving a Resource

To reserve resource, you select the resource in the Chassis Explorer tree view and click the Reserve Resource button in the ribbon menu. Alternatively, you can right-click the resource and select the equivalent menu item.
Once you have reserved the resource all configuration options for that resource will now be enabled.
Releasing Resource
To release any resource reserved by yourself you select the resource in the tree view and click the Release Resource button in the ribbon menu.
Relinquish Resource
To forcibly take away a resource from another user you can select the Relinquish Resource option instead. You will be prompted to confirm this action before it is executed.

Reservation Hierarchy

Reservations are hierarchical exclusive, which means that if user Albert has reserved a given test module then user Bertha will be prevented from reserving any port on that module. The same applies to chassis reservations. However, user Albert does not reserve the ports on the test module by reserving the test module itself.

In general, you do not need to reserve modules and chassis to perform normal traffic generation operations. You should only reserve ports. Reserving modules and chassis are only necessary when performing system maintenance, software upgrades or changing the port types or packet engine allocation on certain ports.