This is probably a really stupid question but I'm new to FC so bare with me.
I know that 8Gb FC equates to about 6.5Gb on FcoE
If I have a 10GB CNA and I am running nothing but FCoE down it (no data just SAN stuff) form a server does the HBA interface that is exposed to teh operating system think its an 8Gb FC interface or does it have no concept of the bandwidth available. What I am trying to get at is if I dedicate a CNA to FCoE do I get 10Gbs through it from the server (assuming the server can drive it that hard) or am I wasting 3.5Gbs of bandwidth that I could be running IP data down instead ?
The question arises as we have a customer with some high density ESXi hosts and P series IBM servers running virtualised AIX that have 4 10Gb CNAs in. As we can't vPC portchannel 4 x 10Gb CNAs when doing FCoE we were thinking about dedicating two CNAs to data and two to FCoE (fabric A and fabric B).
Thanks
