HP Virtual Connect Fibre Channel Networking Scenarios Cookbook

NPIV requirements for VC Fabric-Attach fabrics

Uplink ports within a VC Fabric-Attach fabric can only be connected to Fibre Channel switch that supports N_port_ID

virtualization (NPIV).

The VC-FC and VC FlexFabric modules are FC standards-based and are compatible with all other NPIV standard–

compliant switch products.

Due to the use of NPIV, special features that are available in standard FC switches such as Brocade ISL Trunking,

Cisco SAN Port Channels, QoS, and extended distances are not supported with VC-FC and VC FlexFabric modules.

For more information about NPIV support for your Fibre Channel switch, refer to the switch vendor documentation.

The SAN switch ports connecting to the VC Fabric uplink ports must be configured to accept NPIV logins. For

additional information about NPIV configuration, see "Appendix C: Brocade SAN switch NPIV configuration" or

"Appendix D: Cisco MDS SAN switch NPIV configuration" or "Appendix E: Cisco NEXUS SAN switch NPIV configuration"

depending on your switch model.

Port Group in a Fabric-Attach fabric

Virtual Connect Manager version 1.31 and later allows users to group multiple VC Fabric uplinks logically into a

Virtual Connect fabric when attached to the same Fibre Channel SAN fabric.

Figure 12: Fabric-Attach fabrics using 4 uplinks ports

VC Domain

VC SAN 1

Fabric 1

VC-FC Module

VC SAN 2

Fabric 2

VC-FC Module

There are several benefits with Fabric port grouping:

 Bandwidth is increased.

 Server-to-uplink ratio is improved.

 Better redundancy is provided with automatic port failover.