[DC] Unified Fabric and FCoE

Unified Fabric

• Traditional DCs
  • LAN and SAN fabric isolation
  • Server has 2 adapters  HBA for SAN and NIC for LAN
  • Kept completely seperate end-to-end
• Unified Fabric DCs
  • Server 10G ethernet Converged Network Adapters ( CNAs ) for both LAN and SAN ( FCoE )
  • the LAN and SAN traffic is Unified on the same wire providing I/O consolidation

FCoE

• FCoE is a protocol for transporting native FC frames over an 10G ethernet transport link.
• Full FC frame is encapsulated onto a Jumbo Ethernet Frame.
• FCoE requires lossless delivery.
• FCoE requires a seperate FCoE VLAN from a normal VLAN traffic

FCoE Terminology

• FIP – FCoE Initialisation Protocol
• FCF – FCoE Forwarder ( switch )
  • accesswitch connected to the initiator
• Enode ( server)
  • CNA running FCOE
• Virtual Fibre Channel ( VFC ) Interface
• Virtual Port Types
  • VN_Port
    • virtual node port
  • VF_Port
    • virtual facbric port
  • VE_Port
    • virtual extension port, switch to switch, multihop

Data Center Bridging

• Data Center Briding ( DCB ) is a set of IEEE standards for Unified Fabrics
• Priority Flow Control ( PFC )  ( 802.1Qbb )
  • Lossless delivery for selected CoS
• Enhanced Traffic Selection ( ETS ) ( 8021.Qaz )
  • Bandwith Management and priority selection
• These protocols combined: Datacenter Bridging Exchange