Converged Enhanced Ethernet Administrator's Guide v6.4.0 (53-1001761-01, June 2010)

2 Converged Enhanced Ethernet Administrator’s Guide

53-1001761-01

FCoE overview

DRAFT: BROCADE CONFIDENTIAL

The motivation behind using CEE networks as a transport mechanism for FC arises from the desire

to simplify host protocol stacks and consolidate network interfaces in data center environments. FC

standards allow for building highly reliable, high-performance fabrics for shared storage, and these

characteristics are what CEE brings to data centers. Therefore, it is logical to consider transporting

FC protocols over a reliable CEE network in such a way that it is completely transparent to the

applications. The underlying CEE fabric is highly reliable and high performing, the same as the FC

SAN.

In FCoE, ENodes discover FCFs and initialize the FCoE connection through the FCoE Initialization

Protocol (FIP). The FIP has a separate EtherType from FCoE. The FIP includes a discovery phase in

which ENodes solicit FCFs, and FCFs respond to the solicitations with advertisements of their own.

At this point, the ENodes know enough about the FCFs to log into them. The fabric login and fabric

discovery (FLOGI/FDISC) for VN-to-VF port connections is also part of the FIP.

NOTE

With pre-FIP implementations, as an alternative to FIP, directly connected devices can send an

FCoE-encapsulated FLOGI to the connected FCF.

FCoE hardware

At a fundamental level, FCoE is designed to enable the transport of storage and networking traffic

over the same physical link. Utilizing this technology, the Brocade 8000 switch and the Brocade

FCOE10-24 port blade provide a unique platform that connects servers to both LAN and SAN

environments.

Within this manual, any appearance of the term “Brocade FCoE hardware” is referring to the

following hardware:

• Brocade 8000 switch

• Brocade FCOE10-24 port blade

NOTE

The intermediate switching devices in the CEE network do not have to be FCoE-aware. They simply

route the FCoE traffic to the FCoE device based on the Ethernet destination address in the FCoE

frame.