Brocade Communications Systems IP250 user manual Fibre Channel over Ethernet, FCoE overview

	Chapter
Fibre Channel over Ethernet	16

In this chapter

•FCoE overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481

•Enhanced Ethernet features. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482

•FCoE protocols supported. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483

•FCoE licensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

•Saving running configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

•DCB configuration management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486

•Switch policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487

•DCB configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488

•QoS configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501

•FCoE provisioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508

•VLAN classifier configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 510

•LLDP-DCBX configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514

•802.1x authentication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517

•Switch, port, and LAG deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 520

•Network OS switches in VCS mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

•DCB performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 536

•FCoE login groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538

•Virtual FCoE port configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543

FCoE overview

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) leverages Ethernet enhancements, called Data Center Bridging (DCB), to transport encapsulated Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet. Ethernet is the physical layer over which the encapsulated Fibre Channel 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 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 Fibre Channel logins and logouts is called the FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP).

Brocade Network Advisor IP User Manual	481
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