FCoE
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Fiber Channel over Ethernet
Currently we have in data centres 2 major environments, 2 cabling standards, 2 interface adapters; differences:
- LAN - focus on Ethernet connectivity interfacing with NIC - Network Interface Card
- can deal with packet loss
- SAN - focus on Fibre Channel connectivity interfacing using HBA - Host Bus Adapter
- does not support packet loss
- FCoE utilizes
- interface CNA - Converged Network Adapter that can understand LAN and SAN traffic
- uses 10Gbps Ethernet cable
- takes advantage of layer 2 domains with multipath support using vpc - virtual port channels and FB - Cisco fabric path technology
- FCoE adapted following solutions to overcome converging problems of 2 technologies
- Entire F.C frame needs to carry full payload of Ethernet frame therefore we have Ethernet Jumbo Frames
- map WWN to MAC addresses of Ethernet environment
- FIP - Fibre Channel over Ethernet Initialization Protocol created to handle login of FC devices across of unified fabric
- No packet-loss - using minimum 10Gbps Ethernet cable; there is no packet recovery/delivery mechanism in FCoE
- How
We encapsulate FC frame into Ethernet frame with EtherType=0x8906 HEX
encapsulated EtherType=0x8906 [ Fibre Channel frame ] ----------------------> [ Ethernet frame ] 36B header 2112B data 2148 bytes max frame FCoE uses default MTU=2240 bytes for this unified fabric.