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Can UCS vHBA ports be connected directly to 3rd party FC switches?

Nadav
Level 7
Level 7

Hi everyone,

 

1) If I have a UCS M4/M5 server, and I configure multiple vHBAs, can I connect them directly to a 3rd party FC switch for SAN connectivity without use of an FI?

 

2) Does all vHBA traffic appear as pure FC? 

 

3) Is there any specific kind of special configuration that needs to be done on the 3rd party FC switch to understand the vHBA traffic?

 

Thanks for your time in advance.

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Kirk J
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Greetings.

If your question is in reference to C series servers, then please keep in mind the Cisco VIC cards are FCOE.  Your connection media will be some form of Ethernet (i.e. 10Gb, 40Gb) that is encapsulating FC in FCOE.  Your 1st switch would need FCOE capabilities, but can forward FC traffic via native FC interfaces (FIs, N5ks, N6Ks, do this) if configured to do so.  The northbound FC traffic simply has the FCOE encapsulation removed, and the FC frames are forwarded as normal FC traffic.

If you only have native FC switches, then there are some 8/16Gb native FC adapters available for the M4/M5 servers (Qlogic, Emulex) models you can find in the spec sheets for these servers.

 

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Kirk...

 

View solution in original post

4 Replies 4

calopez2
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee
UCS Blade Server CNA Adapters with vHBA/vNIC’s use Fabric Interconnects to connect to external fabrics/Storage.

Because vHBAs can't interoperate with other FC switches without an FI
between them?

Kirk J
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Greetings.

If your question is in reference to C series servers, then please keep in mind the Cisco VIC cards are FCOE.  Your connection media will be some form of Ethernet (i.e. 10Gb, 40Gb) that is encapsulating FC in FCOE.  Your 1st switch would need FCOE capabilities, but can forward FC traffic via native FC interfaces (FIs, N5ks, N6Ks, do this) if configured to do so.  The northbound FC traffic simply has the FCOE encapsulation removed, and the FC frames are forwarded as normal FC traffic.

If you only have native FC switches, then there are some 8/16Gb native FC adapters available for the M4/M5 servers (Qlogic, Emulex) models you can find in the spec sheets for these servers.

 

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Kirk...

 

Thanks Kirk,

 

Just to be clear, vHBAs are entirely a Cisco FCoE construct?

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