Brocade Adapters Administrator’s Guide 1
53-1001256-01
Chapter
1
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
In this chapter
•FCoE overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
•Enhanced Ethernet features. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
•FCoE protocols supported. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

FCoE overview

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) leverages Ethernet enhancements, called Converged
Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), to transport encapsulated Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet. Ethernet
is the physical layer over which the encapsulated FC frames are transported.
One of the barriers to using Ethernet as the basis for a converged network has been the limited
bandwidth that Ethernet has historically provided. However, with 10 Gbps Ethernet, the available
bandwidth now offers the potential to consolidate all the traffic types over the same link.
Unlike Fibre Channel, Ethernet is not a peer-to-peer protocol. The mechanism used to discover new
ports, MAC address assignments and FC logins and logouts is called the FCoE Initialization Protocol
(FIP).

DCB exchange protocol

DCB Exchange (DCBX) protocol is used between data center bridging (DCB) devices, such as a
converged network adapter (CNA) and a FCoE switch, to exchange configuration with
directly-connected peers.
NOTE
When DCBX protocol is used, any other LLDP implementation must be disabled on the host systems.