Brocade Fabric OS FCIP Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 (53-1002748-01, March 2013)

8 Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide
53-1002748-01
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 limits set
by Adaptive Rate Limiting (ARL). For example, if the link is 500 Mbps, the aggregate of the ARL
maximum rates connected to that WAN link can be no more than 500 Mbps. For ingress rates,
there is no limit because the FC flow control (BBC) rate limits the incoming data.
• 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, failover, failback,
in-order delivery, and bandwidth aggregation 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.