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

18 Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide
53-1002748-01
FCIP Trunking
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• When configuring tunnels to support large numbers of devices, consider memory limitations of
the Brocade 7800 switch and FX8-24 blade if you are enabling any type of emulation feature,
such as FCP or FICON. If too many devices are present or activated at one time, emulation
operations can be negatively impacted. Refer to “Memory use limitations for large-device
tunnel configurations” on page 35.
FCIP circuits
The following list describes FCIP circuit characteristics, restrictions, and usage:
• General tunnel and circuit requirements:
- A circuit can have a maximum commit rate of 1 Gbps on 1 GbE ports or 10 Gbps on 10
GbE ports.
- The minimum committed rate allowed on a circuit is 10 Mbps.
- In a scenario where an FCIP tunnel has multiple circuits of different metrics, 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.
- A circuit defines source and destination IP addresses on either end of an FCIP tunnel.
- If the circuit source and destination IP addresses are not on the same subnet, an IP static
route must be defined on both sides of the tunnels that designates the gateway IP
addresses.
- As a best practice, all tunnel and circuit settings should be identical on both sides of the
tunnel. This includes committed bandwidth, IPsec, compression, ARL minimum and
maximum, FCIP Fastwrite, OSTP, FICON tunnel, and keepalive timeout values.
- When load-leveling across multiple circuits, the difference between the ARL minimum data
rate set on the slowest circuit in the FCIP trunk and the fastest circuit should be no greater
than a factor of four. For example, a 100 Mbps circuit and a 400 Mbps circuit will work, but
a 10 Mbps and a 400 Mbps circuit will not work. This ensures that the entire bandwidth of
the FCIP trunk can be utilized. If you configure circuits with the committed rates that differ
by more than a factor of four, the entire bandwidth of the FCIP trunk cannot be fully
utilized.
• Tunnel and circuit requirements for 7800 extension switches:
- You can define up to eight IP addresses for a GbE port.
- The 7800 switch contains up to six GbE ports. You can configure up to six circuits per
tunnel (VE_Port) spread out over any of these ports.
- Total circuits per switch cannot exceed 24 (total of four circuits for all GbE ports).
- Each circuit requires a unique IP address.
- A single FCIP circuit cannot exceed 1 Gbps capacity.
• Tunnel and circuit requirements for FX8-24 extension blades:
- You can define up to eight IP addresses for a GbE port.
- You can configure up to 10 circuits for an FCIP tunnel (VE_Port).
- The FX8-24 blade contains two 10GbE ports. You can define up to 10 circuits per FCIP
tunnel spread across the 10GbE ports.
- The FX8-24 blade contains ten 1GbE ports. You can define up to 10 circuits per FCIP
tunnel spread across the 1GbE ports.
- A limit of four FCIP circuits can be configured on a single 1 GbE port.