User guide

NetXtreme II User Guide
September 2013
Broadcom Corporation
Page 180 FCoE Support Document INGSRVT78-CDUM100-R
FCOE SUPPORT
This section describes the contents and procedures associated with installation of the VMware software package for
supporting Broadcom FCoE C-NICs.
DRIVERS
SUPPORTED DISTRIBUTIONS
The FCoE/DCB feature set is supported on VMware ESXi 5.0 and above.
Table 2: Broadcom NetXtreme II FCoE Drivers
Driver Description
bnx2x This driver manages all PCI device resources (registers, host interface queues, etc.) and also
acts as the Layer 2 VMware low-level network driver for Broadcom's NetXtreme II 10G device.
This driver directly controls the hardware and is responsible for sending and receiving Ethernet
packets on behalf of the VMware host networking stack. The bnx2x driver also receives and
processes device interrupts, both on behalf of itself (for L2 networking) and on behalf of the
bnx2fc (FCoE protocol) and CNIC drivers.
bnx2fc The Broadcom VMware FCoE driver is a kernel mode driver used to provide a translation layer
between the VMware SCSI stack and the Broadcom FCoE firmware/hardware. In addition, the
driver interfaces with the networking layer to transmit and receive encapsulated FCoE frames
on behalf of open-fcoe's libfc/libfcoe for FIP/device discovery.
bnx2i The bnx2i driver is Broadcom VMware iSCSI HBA driver. Similar to bnx2fc, bnx2i is a kernel
mode driver used to provide a translation layer between the VMware SCSI stack and the
Broadcom iSCSI firmware/hardware. Bnx2i functions under the open-iscsi framework.