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

12 Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide

53-1002748-01

FX8-24 blade license options

10 GbE port considerations

Enhanced 10GbE port operation is different than 1 GbE port operation and requires special

considerations when configuring circuits, tunnels, failover operations, and bandwidth.

Multigigabit circuits

For each 10 GbE port, you can configure multigigabit circuits. For example, a single 10 Gbps circuit

or two 5 Gbps circuits can be configured per port. A limit of 10 FCIP circuits can be configured on a

single port. The blade at each end of the tunnel must be running Fabric OS v7.0 and later if the

committed rate for circuits exceeds 1 Gbps. The maximum committed rate for a circuit between 10

GbE ports is 10 Gbps.

NOTE

There is no difference in latency or throughput performance for single or multigigabit circuits.

Bandwidth allocation and restrictions

You cannot configure more than 10 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth on a 10GbE port. Following are

two examples to clarify these requirements on ports supporting circuits with different metrics. Note

that circuits with higher metrics are treated as standby circuits and are not used until all lower

metric circuits fail. Refer to “FCIP circuit failover capabilities” for a more detailed description.

NOTE

In the following examples, configuring VE_Port 12 on xge0 is a crossport configuration. For more

information on crossports, refer to “Configuring crossports” on page 13.

• VE_Port 12 has two 10 Gbps circuits. Circuit 0 has a metric of 0 on xge1 and circuit 1 has a

metric 1 on xge0. With this configuration, no other tunnels or circuits would be allowed on this

blade because both XGE ports have 10 Gbps of configured bandwidth.

• VE_Port 12 has two 10 Gbps circuits. Circuit 0 has a metric of 0 on xge1, and circuit 1 has a

metric of 1 on xge0. In this case, the configuration is allowed, but you could not create

additional circuits for either VE port group. For the VE_Port 12-21 port group, VE_Port 12 is

consuming 10 Gbps of back-end port bandwidth, so additional circuits from another tunnel

could not be created. For the VE_Port 22-31 group, the bandwidth would exceed either the

front end port bandwidth or the crossport bandwidth. Again VE_Port 12 circuit 1 is consuming

10 Gbps of crossport bandwidth and 10 Gbps of front end port bandwidth for xge0, so you

cannot create additional circuits for VE_Port 22-31 group.

Note that there can only be a maximum of 10 Gbps defined over the crossport configuration.

Therefore, in the preceding example, since VE_Port 12 is configured with a single 10 Gbps

circuit over xge0 (which would be the crossport for VE_Port 12-21 group), there can be no other

crossport configurations. You could not configure a crossport for VE_Port 22-31 port group

because VE_Port 12 is using all 10 Gbps bandwidth for xge0. This would also restrict you from

configuring any circuits for VE_Ports 22-31 at all. Therefore, consuming the crossport

bandwidth for primary metric 0 circuits is not recommended. Refer to “Crossport bandwidth

allocation” on page 16 for more information.

NOTE

The terms “XGE port” and “GbE port” may be used interchangeably in this document.