Reference Guide

8 Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide
53-1002474-01
FX8-24 blade hardware overview
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VE_Ports and FCIP tunnels on the 7800 switch
A 7800 switch can support eight VE_Ports. VE_Ports are numbered from 16 through 23. Each FCIP
tunnel is identified with a VE_Port number. Up to eight FCIP tunnels can be created. The 7800
switch supports VEX_Ports to avoid the need to merge fabrics.
Consider the following when using tunnels and VE_Ports:
• On a 7800, the total bandwidth limit is 6 Gbps for VE_Ports.
• As a best practice, Fibre Channel traffic through a VE_Port tunnel should not exceed
recommended oversubscription guidelines. General guidelines include 2-to-1 oversubscription
without compression (for example, 1 Gbps over a 500 Mbps tunnel) and 4-to-1
oversubscription with compression.
• VE_Ports or VEX_Ports cannot connect to the same domain at the same time as Fibre Channel
E_Ports or EX_Ports.
FCIP trunking capacity on the 7800 switch
FCIP trunks are built by creating a set of FCIP circuits. FCIP circuits create multiple source and
destination addresses for routing traffic over a WAN, providing load leveling and failover
capabilities over an FCIP tunnel. When the 7800 upgrade license and Advanced Extension License
are activated, the FCIP trunking capacity is as follows:
• The maximum trunk capacity is 6 Gbps.
• You can define up to eight IP addresses for a GbE port.
• There is a hard limit of four FCIP circuits per GbE port, each requiring a unique IP address.
• Up up to six FCIP circuits can be defined per FCIP tunnel. These circuits can be spread out over
any GbE ports.
• A single FCIP circuit cannot exceed 1 Gbps capacity.
FX8-24 blade hardware overview
Figure 3 on page 9 shows the FC ports, GbE ports, and 10GbE ports on the FX8-24 blade. There
are 12 FC ports, numbered 0 through 11. The FC ports can operate at 1, 2, 4, or 8 Gbps. There are
10 GbE ports, numbered 0 through 9. Ports xge0 and xge1 are 10GbE ports.
The FX8-24 blade allows a maximum of 20 Gbps of bandwidth for tunnel connections, and can
operate in one of three different modes:
• 1 Gbps mode - You can use all ten GbE ports (0 through 9). Both XGE ports are disabled.
• 10 Gbps mode - You can use the xge0 and xge1 ports.
• Dual mode - You can use GbE ports 0 through 9, and port xge0.
The FX8-24 blade can be deployed in either a DCX, DCX-4S, DCX 8510-8, or DCX 8510-4 chassis.