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Fibre Channel over Ehternet

posted Dec 10, 2013, 7:21 PM by Rick McGee
What is Converged Ethernet?
  • Lots of terms that essentially mean the same thing
    • Unified Fabric
    • Unified Wire
    • Converged Ethernet
    • Converged Enhanced Ethernet
    • Data Center Ethernet
    • Data Center Bridging
  • What they all really mean:
    • Ethernet and Fibre Channel both on the same infrastructure
FCOE Terminology
  • FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) ENode
    • Negotiate to FCF
  • FCoE Forwarder (FCF) Switch Running FCOE
  • ENode uses Virtual Fibre Channel (VFC) Interface
  • Virtual Port Types
    • VN_Port End host UCS C end server
    • VF_Port Nexus 5K switch
    • VE_Port Switch to Switch
How FCoE Works
  • FCoE replaces layer 1 and 2 transport for Fibre Channel  with Ethernet
  • All upper layer FC services remain
    • Domain ID's, FSFP, FCNS, FLOGI, Zoning, etc....
  • New FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) to negotiate between Fabric port and Node Port
    • Fabric is the FCF
    • Node is the ENode
FIP vs. FCoE
  • FIP is the control plane of the FCoE
  • FCoE is the actual data plane
  • FIP
    • New EtherType 0x8914
    • Used to discover FCF's and perform FLOGI
  • FCoE
    • New EtherType 8x8906
    • Max length of 2240 bytes
      • Will need Jumbo frame enabled
Output for a "show policy-map system" where you set the MTU
FCoE Addressing
  • Fibre Channel uses 3 byte FCID's
  • Ethernet uses 6 byte MAC Addresses
  • How do we correlate the two?
  • FCoE ENode get a Fabric Provided MAC Address (FPMA) for FCoE
    • Still uses it's regular MAC for LAN Traffic
Fabric Provided MAC addresses (FPMA's)
  • During FIP, ENode is assigned a 3 byte FCID
    • FLOGI is part of FIP
  • FCF is configured with a 3 byte FCoE MAC address Prefix (FC-MAP)
  • ENode appends FC-MAP to FCID
  • 3 byte FC-MAP + 3 byte FCID= 6 byte FPMA
Configuring FCoE
  • FCF's config is only a few additional steps:
  • Feature fcoe (NPV)
  • Create a VSAN
  • Associate VLAN to a VLAN
  • Configure a VFC (for each ENode)
  • Associate Physical Ethernet to the VFC
  • Assign VFC to the VSAN

  • Configure physical Ethernet as a Trunk\
  • Activate interfaces
Show flogi to show that it's logged into the fabric

show fcoe for FPMA address


Good Cisco Live Session for FCOE

BRKDCT-1044 - FCoE for the IP Network Engineer



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