Multi-Vendor SM Failover Is Not Supported

When the author discovered the following statement in the specification, it answered a lot of open questions. Although any SM from any vendor must be able to manage devices from multiple vendors, there is no requirement for interoperability among SMs from different vendors. This explains why the specification says the manner in which the SMInfo.SM_Key and the SMInfo.Priority (both of which are read-only—see “SMInfo Attribute” on page 842) are assigned is outside the scope of the specification.

Specification statement:

“The management operations specified herein provide for a level of interoperability such that an SM from any vendor can manage a heterogeneous collection of IBA-compliant channel adapters, switches, and routers from any set of vendors. However, compatibility and interoperability among SMs from different vendors is not supported. Migration from one vendor's SM to another's by way of system reinitialization, i.e., through a planned outage, is supported. Such migration assumes appropriate steps of transferring data between vendors' SMs have been accomplished prior to the reinitialization.”