HP 5120-EI never brings up an Allied Telesis AT-SPEX SFP: FIBER_SFPMODULE_NOWINVALID, no way to disable the coding check
1
On an HP 5120-EI the poster inserted an Allied Telesis AT-SPEX 1310 nm SFP and got a PHONY ENTITY trap plus OPTMOD/4/FIBER_SFPMODULE_NOWINVALID: This is not a supported transceiver for this platform; the port never came up. The poster looked for a command to disable enforcement of SFP coding. Later readers reported the same messages with StarTech SFP+ DACs between a Nexus 9000 and HP 5500 (port down, no link light, shut/no shut did not help) and noted HP wanted almost 800 USD for an SFP+-to-XFP DAC.
- Hardware: HP 5120-EI, HP 5500, HP 5820, Cisco Nexus 9000
- Transceivers: Allied Telesis AT-SPEX, StarTech SFP+ DAC, Axiom SFP+ DAC
- Form factor: SFP, SFP+, DAC
Symptoms / messages:
OPTMOD/4/FIBER_SFPMODULE_NOWINVALID
ENTITY/1/PHONY ENTITY trap
port stays down, no link light
Comments 3
Vendor-ID enforcement exists only in the Chinese H3C firmware images; HP-branded firmware only nags. The nag can be silenced with transceiver phoney alarm disable, but that command is absent on 5120/5500/5820 of that era.
HP support answered simply not supported; old 3Com transceivers that worked on Comware 3 switches also failed on Comware 5, so the modules were replaced.
For cross-vendor links use regular SFP+ optics (single-mode preferred) instead of DACs, which are best kept for same-vendor interconnects; the DAC user's reseller swapped StarTech for Axiom cables.